iss Emily needs to be helped," I said, rather feebly.

"Let her friends help her. She has plenty of them. Besides, isn't it
rather a queer way to help her, to try to fasten a murder on her?"

I could not explain what I felt so strongly--that Miss Emily could only
be helped by being hurt, that whatever she was concealing, the long
concealment was killing her. That I felt in her--it is always difficult
to put what I felt about Miss Emily into words--that she both hoped for
and dreaded desperately the light of the truth.

But if I was hardly practical when it came to Miss Emily, I was
rational enough in other things. It is with no small pride--but without
exultation, for in the end it cost too much--that I point to the
solution of one issue as my own.

With Willie gone, Maggie and I settled down to the quiet tenure of our
days. She informed me, on the morning after that eventful night, that
she had not closed an eye after one o'clock! She came into the library
and asked me if I could order her some sleeping-powders.

"Fiddlesticks!" I said sharply. "You slept all night. I was up and
around the house, and you never knew it."

"Honest to heaven, Miss Agnes, I never slep' at all. I heard a horse
galloping', like it was runnin' off, and it waked me for good."

And after a time I felt that, however mistaken Maggie had been about her
night's sleep, she was possibly correct about the horse.

"He started to run about the stable somewhere," she said. "You can smile
if you want. That's the heaven's truth. And he came down the drive on
the jump and out onto the road."

"We can go and look for hoof-marks," I said, and rose. But Maggie only
shook her head.

"It was no real horse, Miss Agnes," she said. "You'll find nothing.
Anyhow, I've been and looked. There's not a mark."

But Maggie was wrong. I found hoof-prints in plenty in the turf beside
the drive, and a track of them through the lettuce-bed in the garden.
More than that, behind the stable I found where a horse had been tied
and had broken away. A piece of worn strap still hung there. It was
sufficiently clear, then, that whoever had broken into the house had
come on horseback and left afoot. But many people in the neighborhood
used horses. The clue, if clue it can be called, got me nowhere.

IV

For several days things remained in statu quo. Our lives went on evenly.
The telephone was at our service, without any of its past vagaries.
Maggie's eyes ceased