Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/136

 stone balustrade looked down. Below her the river flowed in the moonlight a pale golden yellow, shrunken by the drought to the size of a brook. It smelled badly. Save for a pair of lovers the long bare quai was empty. The lovers leaned against the river wall, two small black figures melted into a single passionate shadow. Presently on the bridge just beneath appeared the dimmed lights of a motor.

"There he is now," she thought. The motor turned slowly into the street below and moved toward the Palazzo Biancamano, and the old feeling of sickness swept over her. He was coming nearer and nearer. He would stop now at the door—She waited, but he did not stop. The motor went slowly on. Perhaps he had mistaken the way or did not know the house. But that could not be. He knew Brinoë well. He knew Nina's apartment. Perhaps he had had a small accident on the way, an accident that had delayed him but not injured him, and he had telegraphed, only they had failed to deliver the telegram. Things like that happened in Italy. It wasn't any better with the Fascisti, no matter how much they said to the contrary. You couldn't change the whole character of a race overnight. In America. . . . What was America like now? It was eighteen years since she had last been there. Queer that she always thought of it as "home" when she had lived in Europe more than half her life.

In one of the apartments below someone had begun to play a piano and to sing. It was familiar