Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/208

 drink so she came to the conclusion that his drinking was not a disease but done deliberately out of despair. Once in a burst of confidence he confided to her that on the night he had come to the Pot and Pie he had been contemplating suicide but that on studying the chilly river he had decided instead to drink himself to death. He was a simple fellow, she thought, who didn't pretend to be anything he was not.

Then one day he asked her timidly if she would do an errand for him. He wanted some books and he was still too ill to go into the city for them himself. So Bessie dressed herself up and made the excursion, bearing a slip of paper on which were written the titles, because she could not possibly have remembered them. They were difficult names which impressed her profoundly, such names as Astaroth and Indo-Persian and Anaït. They seemed very rare books, for she was forced to trudge from shop to shop to find them all, and they were very expensive. Later on she made other trips to buy books until her room had quite the air of a library. Then Mr. Blundon bought ink and pens and paper and went to work. Each day he covered a great many sheets of paper with spidery handwriting which she attempted without much success to decipher when he was not in the room. But even those portions which she was able to read (and she was none too good at reading and writing) she failed to understand, and she had not the presumption to question him about the whole affair.

But all this took money (she had even to buy him new clothes) and so Bessie went more and more