So it went through the hours. Her fear, which I still think was the terror that communicated itself to me; the various clues, which she, poor victim, had overlooked; the articles laid carelessly in the book she had been reading and accidentally hidden with her brother"s forbidden literature; the books themselves, with all of five years to destroy them, and left untouched; her own anxiety about the confession in the telephone-box, which led to our finding it; her espionage of the house by means of the telephone; the doctor"s night visit in search of the confession; the daily penance for five years of the dead woman"s photograph in her room--all of these--and her occasional weakenings, poor soul, when she tried to change her handwriting against discovery, and refused to allow the second telephone to be installed.
How clear it was! How, in a way, inevitable! And, too, how really best for her it had turned out. For she had made a pact, and she died believing that discovery here had come, and would take the place of punishment beyond.
Martin Sprague came the next day. I was in the library alone, and he was with Anne in the garden, when Maggie came into the room with a saucer of crab-apple jelly.
"I wish you"d look at this," she said. "If it"s cooked too much, it gets tough and--" She straightened suddenly and stood staring out through a window.
"I"d thank you to look out and see the goings-on in our garden," she said sharply. "In broad daylight, too. I--"
But I did not hear what else Maggie had to say. I glanced out, and Martin had raised the girl"s face to his and was kissing her, gently and very tenderly.
And then--and again, as with fear, it is hard to put into words--I felt come over me such a wave of contentment and happiness as made me close my eyes with the sheer relief and joy of it. All was well. The past was past, and out of its mistakes had come a beautiful thing. And, like the fear, this joy was not mine. It came to me. I picked it up--a thought without words.
Sometimes I think about it, and I wonder--did little Miss Emily know?