That night Bob Kenworthy sat unsuspectingly reading a coon story in a popular weekly, in his own living room, in the light of a lamp his daughter had given him for Christmas. His wife sat at her desk near the window, pretending to write letters, and every once in a while she glanced slyly over at him to see if he was conscious of what she was doing; and sometimes she even looked suspiciously at the curtains to make sure no one was peeping in at the words she had guiltily written. She had sat there more than an hour, and she was beginning that letter in vain. A more distasteful task she had seldom decided upon. To put down in black and white a denial of the grotesque mistake she had suffered to continue in Martha's thought seemed impossible. An acknowledgment of her complicity in the misunderstanding seemed too humiliating. How could she be sure, besides, into whose hands her written words might not come? Might not that complacent husband of hers, sitting there, never imagining how thankfully he had been discarded by his child, sometime come upon the letter that must seem to him treacherous? Emily didn't intend sending the letter to Martha; that course was too perilous to consider. She intended to put it away, in case of such an emergency as this last one of Cora Benton's. It seemed, however, the right thing altogether for Cora Benton to have given directions for her funeral. The community expected her to do that. But for Emily Kenworthy to do it seemed silly melodrama.
She sat with her arm hiding the words she had written, now that she had begun for the fifth time, though there was no eye in the room to behold them. She had finished.
"My dear Child." She had got down a further sentence or two. "I couldn't collect my wits in time the other day to tell you what a mistaken idea you had of your father and me. I have never been unfaithful to him in my life." She glanced again guiltily at Bob. Poor old harmless thing! He had been certainly—good and a patient husband. And, sitting there, he did look like Jim. The elusive likeness between the two had always fascinated her; Jim's head had been like that. His face was longer, finer, more delicate. It was for Jim's sake, of course, and not Bob's she was writing this. She would not have Martha thinking Jim a common old love pirate! She took her arms from across the paper; she re-read what she had written. "I have never been unfaithful to him in my life." Then she added, impulsively, "I never had a chance to be." She studied her achievement, and covered it up with a blotter and sat thinking. Then she went at it again for a few minutes. "I am writing this to you the day of Mrs. Benton's funeral in case I haven't an opportunity to tell you personally." She was on the point of adding, "Your uncle wasn't that sort of man." But suppose Bob should sometime see those words? She might say, "The Kenworthy men are too good for that sort of thing." Yes, that might do.
Bob threw down his paper. Emily jumped.
"Some coon story!" he yawned. "Let's go to bed."
"You go on up, Bob," she said, earnestly. "I'm just coming."
When he came up from "fixing the furnace" she was rearranging her desk. In the center of it was a little compartment that could be locked but seldom was. It was full of rather useless trifles. She had found the little key to it now in a small adjoining drawer, and she had locked away a small envelope inclosed in the very center of several larger ones. It was addressed to Martha, "to be opened after my death." As she went upstairs wondering where to hide that key, she felt more like a perfect fool than she had felt in years. She looked about the room. At one side of her bureau there hung an enlarged snapshot of Martha as a four-year-old, hugging a puppy. Emily had always thought it a perfectly beautiful picture. When Bob was in the bathroom, she went cautiously over to it and tied the key to the wire by which the picture hung. "Nobody would ever find it there if I should die," she said to herself; "and besides I probably won't." But later, when she heard Bob sleeping, she got up gently and hid the key in the bottom drawer of the bureau beneath some summer underthings, for, of course, Maggie would dust that picture as soon as she was able to be about, and demand to be told what key that was.
Afterwards she would say to herself, waking in the night: "Well, suppose anyone should find that key and open the desk and see the letter. It's a very sensible thing to leave directions for your funeral. Everybody ought to do it. Still..."
And Johnnie Benton was about from time to time, reminding her of the possibility of sudden death. He wouldn't go back to school. He might have agreed, in the shock of his grief, to conform to all burial conventions out of respect for his mother. But to go back and try for a degree, he refused absolutely and confidently.
"I haven't told THEM," he said to Emily, nodding his head towards the house where his aunts still tarried. "Aunt Grace wants to keep house for me!" The tone of his voice suggested she had proposed at least to murder him. "I told them I'd go back as soon as it's settled, all the business; but I couldn't get a degree in ten years if I did go back. And goodness knows when things will be settled." The delay wasn't annoying Johnnie.