Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/150

 again of that strange statue found in the garden of the Villa Leonardo.

The book slipped forgotten to the floor, where Ottilia found it the next morning when her "cousin," the green-grocer, had gone. 

ROM the day that Annie and Uriah Spragg left Cordova their existence drifted into a strange state that was something more and something less than human. In all their obscure wanderings it appears that they were hounded like the figures out of a Greek tragedy by some fate which gave them no peace, shutting them further and further away from the world into the solitude of their own souls. It may have been that the consciousness of their own queerness set them apart, or it may have been as Signora Bardelli, the janitress, believed long afterward—that Miss Annie Spragg sold her soul to the Devil, a bargain she made perhaps on the day that Uriah found the body of Leander Potts lying in her bower by the bend of the river. Perhaps she preferred the Devil to such a God as Uriah worshipped. The same strange thing that shut them in from the world bound them to each other in a lonely solitude.

On fleeing Cordova they fell back once more into that life which they had led so long as children of the Prophet. From town to town they went and from village to village and crossroad to crossroad, carry-