Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/176

 memories that crowded in upon him, memories which went back years before there was ever a potential saint in the Palazzo Gonfarini. In Fulco's eyes there was that same fire of belief that had once burned in her eyes. It redeemed Fulco, he thought, from being an utter lout. "There is a demon born in me," he thought, "that has always tormented those I have loved best." Anna, too, he had tormented, long afterward.

Again he began to think what his life would have been if at its beginning he had taken another turning. If he had married Laura. He could have married her even at the end before she died when Fulco was born, but chance had brought him too late, an hour after she had died, going out into the darkness shaken and terrified because he had destroyed her faith. That, he thought, was a real sin, a sin that could torment one even into the grave. Her poor faith did no one any harm and it had made her unafraid.

And now for forty years he had been atoning for that sin since the day when in the midst of youth he had turned to the Church to atone. He had kept his vow. He had atoned. From that day on he had never known love, and for him that was not an easy thing. But others had been made to atone as well, for life was a silly tangled thing. There was Anna driving through the darkness like a mad woman to meet her lover because she had never found love and still believed that one day she might find it. That was her faith, a good faith, quite as good perhaps as the other though more easily proven false. She would not believe that already