Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/241

 But Bessie died without ever returning to Bayswater. She died while the crowds stood in the hot street before the Palazzo Gonfarini in Brinoë looking up at the window where Miss Annie Spragg lay dead. 

IGNORA BARDELLI, concierge of the Palazza Gonfarini, had asked for Sister Annunziata and she stood there firmly waiting until she got what she wanted. It was always Sister Annunziata whom they asked for when they wanted a nun to come to the bedside of one of their dying. Sister Maria Maddelena, who stood in the small square room facing the agitated janitress, was in her heart a proud nun and when she thought "they" she meant all the poor who lived in the decaying old rookeries in the quarter about the Palazzo Gonfarini. Usually "they" asked for Sister Annunziata timidly but there was no timidity in the bearing of the stalwart Signora Bardelli. Sister Maria Maddelena knew her by reputation, a shrewd and a boastful woman, who mocked priests and the Church. The sister, who was human in her small way, could not resist murmuring, "But you do not hold with the Church, Signora Bardelli."

"It is not for me," said the janitress. "It is for the stranger living in my house. She is religious." She gave a shrug indicating that when she came to die she would not call upon the hocus pocus of the Church. 