Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/156

 dle of the day. Heat seemed to have no effect upon his great shambling body, not even the thick damp heat of the fertile prairies. He was fifty-one and then fifty-two and life and the atonement he had planned seemed only to withdraw further and further from him. There were men and women who presently had stopped coming to his church and others who, for reasons he could not understand, hated him. He had done his best, his duty; he had been hard and conscientious toward Annie as well as toward himself, yet none loved him, none asked his aid. He still possessed his gigantic physical strength, but he was becoming an old man, with hair turning white. The bitter chiselled lines in his face were becoming great hard gashes that gave the countenance a perpetual look of anger and hatred. The pale blue eyes sank deeper and deeper into their cavernous sockets. And the ungainly body, denied since the beginning the pleasures for which nature intended it, began like the bodies of those who abuse the pleasures of the flesh to be racked with obscure but devastating pains. At times he could no longer stand erect for the pain in his spine. People saw him day after day walking along the country road, his body bent with pain, still in the same old posture, with the great bony hands clasped behind him, composing his bitter sermons as he walked or calling fiercely upon God for strength.

There had never been much love in the harsh body and even the little that there had been appeared to have burned itself out in the flame of his strange passion for Leander Potts. But neither was there any hate in him, but only that thing which is less than