Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/132

 She fled from him as she might have tried to flee her own conscience. Father d'Astier was all the conscience she had, and now he had turned up in Brinoë when she wanted least to encounter him. Who could have expected to find him there in the horrible heat of August when everybody fled Brinoë? (In her mind echoed the shadow, "Anybody who is anybody." Not seedy people, of course, like those she had encountered this afternoon.) Oh, he knew well enough why she was there and what she was doing. That was why he had been so silent, as if she were betraying him. But he had been reasonable enough, all things considered; he had never reproached her but once and then only by the inscription on the fly-leaf of the Thomas-à-Kempis. He had kept silent, which in a way was worse than if he had spoken, especially when you had loved him for nearly thirty years.

At the door of the Palazzo Biancamano, she turned the motor over to the chauffeur. "At five tomorrow, Enrico," she said, looking a little away from him. Enrico, too, knew why she was in Brinoë. He knew why she had driven through the dust and heat all the way from Venice in August. She would not need the motor until five because she and Oreste would spend the heat of the day in the apartment.

As the motor drove off she turned and looked up at the windows of the apartment with that sudden feeling of sickness and ecstasy which always overcame her at such times. The windows were still dark. She was in time. He had not come yet.