Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/197

 She thought he was asleep at first or in one of his trances, but he was dead. There was no mark of any kind on his body.

She picked him up and managed to carry him to the edge of the swamp, where she laid his body on the grass beside the brook until Ed Hasselman could come and help her get it back to the house. Dead, he seemed to her more beautiful than ever. It was odd, she told Ed Hasselman, that he had never appeared to grow any older. He must have been thirty-eight when he died but he looked no older than he had looked at twenty. Perhaps, she said, it was because he was half-witted. People like that didn't seem to grow old. They belonged to a world of their own.

The church buried him in consecrated ground, so Mary's soul was at peace. After that she was never sober again and at last they took her out of the filth and squalor of the little shack, off to the poorhouse. One morning three weeks after they brought her there the keeper found her dead in bed. She was seventy-seven years old, a queer dried-up wisp of a woman who had once been the fine high-colored Mary Bosanky. In all those seventy-seven years life had never once been fine enough for her. 