Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/110

 "Gertrude dear. Listen to Aunt Henrietta. You've broken her heart."

Still no response.

"Gertrude dear. Aunt Henrietta is willing to forgive. You wouldn't let a little quarrel like that break up all the love of twenty years?"

Not a word.

"Gertrude dear, let Aunt Henrietta go to bed knowing that you are sorry for the awful things you said."

In the end she went away, and in the morning when she went again to Miss Fosdick's room, she found it empty. Margharita, with a malicious gleam in her eye, said she had seen Miss Fosdick at dawn walking along the road to Monte Salvatore. She was carrying a handbag. 

N the seventies the town of Cordova straggled its length along the highroad which once had been a trail across the prairies into the Far West. There were a few houses built of sawed timber, a few of the log houses that were remnants of its early days, a few shanties that served as dwelling-places for the negroes along the river, and the pretentious brick buildings of the Primitive Methodist Divinity School. The village sat pressed against a flat prairie so vast that it seemed to extend to the limits of the known world. The only break in the even line of its monotony was the sluggish meander-