Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/175

 a picture that hung there. (Fulco was talking, talking. He became drunk with words without ever knowing their value.) Laura was her name, like Petrarch's Laura. It was odd how long an old wound could give pain.

He had been young then and strong, not this old man tired of the world who sat listening to Fulco's complaints against his fellow priests—young and twenty-two, a boy who thought the world his for the taking, a boy who sinned and then tormented himself with his sense of sin and then mocked at God and the Church, only to begin again on the same round in the order. He had been full of animal delight at being alive, and the delight of delights was Laura Baldessare. It was not the memory of his sin with her that troubled him now, but of the other sin he had committed, so much the worse, of destroying her soul by tearing from it cruelly the simple faith that had dwelt there. He had done it with wild gusts of adolescent talk, and because she loved him she had believed what he told her. She believed anything he told her—he who stood in awe of God at one moment and in the next felt superior to God, a silly fellow strong enough to doubt but too feeble to stand before the awesome spectacle of a universe. He knew better now. He was no longer defiant. He only waited for the end, to see.

Fulco was questioning him. He raised his head and murmured, "Yes, Fulco, but continue. Tell me all your reasons first." Fulco was so certain that the old maid was a saint.

He could not hear what Fulco said for the