Then they sat without speaking or moving.
"I wonder how it would seem," Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her way over strange ground—"never to have had any children around?" Her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen had meant through all the years. "No, Wright wouldn't like the bird," she said after that—"a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too." Her voice tightened.
Mrs. Peters moved uneasily.
"Of course we don't know who killed the bird."
"I knew John Wright," was Mrs. Hale's answer.
"It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale," said the sheriff's wife. "Killing a man while he slept—slipping a thing round his neck that choked the life out of him."
Mrs. Hale's hand went out to the bird-cage.
"His neck. Choked the life out of him."
"We don't know who killed him," whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. "We don't know."
Mrs. Hale had not moved. "If there had been years and years of—nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still—after the bird was still."