I had several visits from Martin Sprague since Miss Emily’s death, and after a time I realized that he was interested in Anne.  She was quite attractive in her mourning clothes, and there was something about her, not in feature, but in neatness and in the way her things had of, well, staying in place, that reminded me of Miss Emily herself.  It was rather surprising, too, to see the way she fitted into her new surroundings and circumstances.

But I did not approve of Martin’s attraction to her.  She had volunteered no information about herself, she apparently had no people.  She was a lady, I felt, although, with the exception of her new mourning, her clothing was shabby and her linen even coarse.

She held the key to the confession.  I knew that.  And I had no more hope of getting it from her than I had from the cat.  So I prepared to go back to the city, with the mystery unsolved.  It seemed a pity, when I had got so far with it.  I had reconstructed a situation out of such bricks as I had, the books in the cellar, Mrs. Graves’s story of the river, the confession, possibly the note-book and the handkerchief.  I had even some material left over in the form of the night intruder, who may or may not have been the doctor.  And then, having got so far, I had had to stop for lack of other bricks.

A day or two before I went back to the city, Maggie came to me with a folded handkerchief in her hand.

“Is that yours?” she asked.

I disclaimed it.  It was not very fine, and looked rather yellow.

“S’got a name on it,” Maggie volunteered.  “Wright, I think it is.  ’Tain’t hers, unless she’s picked it up somewhere.  It’s just come out of the wash.”

Maggie’s eyes were snapping with suspicion.  “There ain’t any Wrights around here, Miss Agnes,” she said.  “I sh’d say she’s here under a false name.  Wright’s likely hers.”

In tracing the mystery of the confession, I find that three apparently disconnected discoveries paved the way to its solution.  Of these the handkerchief came first.

I was inclined to think that in some manner the handkerchief I had found in the book in the cellar had got into the wash.  But it was where I had placed it for safety, in the wall-closet in the library.  I brought it out and compared the two.  They were unlike, save in the one regard.  The name “Wright” was clear enough on the one Maggie had found.  With it as a guide, the other name was easily seen to be the same.  Moreover, both had been marked by the same hand.

Yet, on Anne Bullard being shown the one Maggie had found, she disclaimed it.  “Don’t you think some one dropped it at the funeral?” she asked.

But I thought, as I turned away, that she took a step toward me.  When I stopped, however, and faced about, she was intent on something outside the window.

And so it went.  I got nowhere.  And now, by way of complication, I felt my sympathy for Anne’s loneliness turning to genuine interest.  She was so stoical, so repressed, and so lonely.  And she was tremendously proud.  Her pride was vaguely reminiscent of Miss Emily’s.  She bore her ostracism almost fiercely, yet there were times when I felt her eyes on me, singularly gentle and appealing.  Yet she volunteered nothing about herself.