to weak tea, when Miss Emily took hers very strong. And such was
the effect of their mutual watchfulness and suspicion, such perhaps
was the influence of the staid old house on me, after a time even
that fact, of the strong tea, began to strike me as incongruous.
Miss Emily was so consistent, so consistently frail and dainty and
so--well, unspotted seems to be the word--and so gentle, yet as
time went on I began to feel that she hated Maggie with a real
hatred. And there was the strong tea!

Indeed, it was not quite normal, nor was I. For by that time--the
middle of July it was before I figured out as much as I have set
down in five minutes--by that time I was not certain about the
house. It was difficult to say just what I felt about the house.
Willie, who came down over a Sunday early in the summer, possibly
voiced it when he came down to his breakfast there.

"How did you sleep?" I asked.

"Not very well." He picked up his coffee-cup, and smiled over it
rather sheepishly. "To tell the truth, I got to thinking about
things--the furniture and all that," he said vaguely. "How many
people have sat in the chairs and seen themselves in the mirror and
died in the bed, and so on."

Maggie, who was bringing in the toast, gave a sort of low moan,
which she turned into a cough.

"There have been twenty-three deaths in it in the last forty years,
Mr. Willie," she volunteered. "That's according to the gardener.
And more than half died in that room of yours."