I may have fancied it—­I am always fancying things about Miss Emily—­but I will always think that she knew.  She drew a longer, quieter breath, and her eyes, fixed and staring, closed.  I think she died in the first sleep she had had in twenty-four hours.

I had expected Anne Bullard to show emotion, for no one could doubt her attachment to Miss Emily.  But she only stood stoically by the bed for a moment and then, turning swiftly, went to the wall opposite and took down from the wall the walnut-framed photograph Mrs. Graves had commented on.

Anne Bullard stood with the picture in her hand, looking at it.  And suddenly she broke into sobs.  It was stormy weeping, and I got the impression that she wept, not for Miss Emily, but for many other things—­as though the piled-up grief of years had broken out at last.

She took the photograph away, and I never saw it again.

Miss Emily was buried from her home.  I obliterated myself, and her friends, who were, I felt, her murderers, came in and took charge.  They paid me the tribute of much politeness, but no cordiality, and I think they felt toward me as I felt toward them.  They blamed me with the whole affair.

She left her property all to Anne Bullard, to the astonished rage of the congregation, which had expected the return of its dimes and quarters, no doubt, in the shape of a new altar, or perhaps an organ.

“Not a cent to keep up the mausoleum or anything,” Mrs. Graves confided to me.  “And nothing to the church.  All to that telephone-girl, who comes from no one knows where!  It’s enough to make her father turn over in his grave.  It has set people talking, I can tell you.”

Maggie’s mental state during the days preceding the funeral was curious.  She coupled the most meticulous care as to the preparations for the ceremony, and a sort of loving gentleness when she decked Miss Emily’s small old frame for its last rites, with suspicion and hatred of Miss Emily living.  And this suspicion she held also against Anne Bullard.

Yet she did not want to leave the house.  I do not know just what she expected to find.  We were cleaning up preparatory to going back to the city, and I felt that at least a part of Maggie’s enthusiasm for corners was due to a hope of locating more concealed papers.  She was rather less than polite to the Bullard girl, who was staying on at my invitation—­because the village was now flagrantly unfriendly and suspicious of her.  And for some strange reason, the fact that Miss Emily’s cat followed Anne everywhere convinced Maggie that her suspicions were justified.

“It’s like this, Miss Agnes,” she said one morning, leaning on the handle of a floor brush.  “She had some power over the old lady, and that’s how she got the property.  And I am saying nothing, but she’s no Christian, that girl.  To see her and that cat going out night after night, both snooping along on their tiptoes—­it ain’t normal.”