The Confession

by Mary Roberts Rinehart




THE CONFESSION



I


I am not a susceptible woman. I am objective rather than subjective,
and a fairly full experience of life has taught me that most of my
impressions are from within out rather than the other way about.
For instance, obsession at one time a few years ago of a shadowy
figure on my right, just beyond the field of vision, was later
exposed as the result of a defect in my glasses. In the same way
Maggie, my old servant, was during one entire summer haunted by
church-bells and considered it a personal summons to eternity until
it was shown to be in her inner ear.

Yet the Benton house undeniably made me uncomfortable. Perhaps
it was because it had remained unchanged for so long. The old
horsehair chairs, with their shiny mahogany frames, showed by the
slightly worn places in the carpet before them that they had not
deviated an inch from their position for many years. The carpets
--carpets that reached to the very baseboards and gave under one's