Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/174

 even know that the woman had espoused the Church."

"She was a good woman," persisted Fulco. "The light of God was in her eyes."

"And how do you know the light of God?"

"I know, Father d'Astier, I know. I have seen it once before in the eyes of Sister Annunziata who they are beginning to say is crazy. I know the light of God."

Fulco went a little breathlessly, for the climb up the four flights of stairs to the top of the palace had taken his breath. He kept telling Father d'Astier all those things about Miss Annie Spragg which the older man had already found out for himself and knew better than Fulco. The old priest did not listen. He sat with bowed head as if he were listening, but he was thinking of other things. He was thinking of Brinoë forty years before when he had come to stay with his mother's people, not much different from the Brinoë that lay all about him tonight in the moonlight. The city was too old to alter much. And he was thinking of the villa on the hill beyond the Church of Monte Salvatore, a small white villa surrounded by an orchard of olive trees. And he was thinking of the fat widow of Professor Baldessare and their daughter. The Professor had been a remarkable man, raising himself from the level of the peasantry with a peasant wife, greedy and coarse and vulgar. But the daughter was a miracle. He saw her again with a sickening clarity, like one of the women of Botticelli. There was a room in the Uffizi that he had not entered in years because he could not bear to look at