Miss Emily has been dead for more than a year now.  To publish the letter can do her no harm.  In a way, too, I feel, it may be the fulfilment of that strange pact she made.  For just as discovery was the thing she most dreaded, so she felt that by paying her penalty here she would be saved something beyond—­that sort of spiritual book-keeping which most of us call religion.  Anne Sprague —­she is married now to Martin has, I think, some of Miss Emily’s feeling about it, although she denies it.  But I am sure that in consenting to the recording of Miss Emily’s story, she feels that she is doing what that gentle fatalist would call following the hand of Providence.

I read the letter that night in the library where the light was good.  It was a narrative, not a letter, strictly speaking.  It began abruptly.

“I must set down this thing as it happened.  I shall write it fully, because I must get it off my mind.  I find that I am always composing it, and that my lips move when I walk along the street or even when I am sitting in church.  How terrible if I should some day speak it aloud.  My great-grandmother was a Catholic.  She was a Bullard.  Perhaps it is from her that I have this overwhelming impulse to confession.  And lately I have been terrified.  I must tell it, or I shall shriek it out some day, in the church, during the Litany.  ’From battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.’”

(There was a space here.  When the writing began again, time had elapsed.  The ink was different, the writing more controlled.)

“What a terrible thing hate is.  It is a poison.  It penetrates the mind and the body and changes everything.  I, who once thought I could hate no one, now find that hate is my daily life, my getting up and lying down, my sleep, my waking.

“’From hatred, envy, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us.’

“Must one suffer twice for the same thing?  Is it not true that we pay but one penalty?  Surely we pay either here or beyond, but not both.  Oh, not both!

“Will this ever be found?  Where shall I hide it?  For I have the feeling that I must hide it, not destroy it—­as the Catholic buries his sin with the priest.  My father once said that it is the healthful humiliation of the confessional that is its reason for existing.  If humiliation be a virtue—­”

I have copied the confession to this point, but I find I can not go on.  She was so merciless to herself, so hideously calm, so exact as to dates and hours.  She had laid her life on the table and dissected it—­for the Almighty!

I heard the story that night gently told, and somehow I feel that that is the version by which Miss Emily will be judged.

“If humiliation be a virtue—­” I read and was about to turn the page, when I heard Anne in the hall.  She was not alone.  I recognized Doctor Lingard’s voice.