Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/243

 rites of the dying. And that will be your fault for delaying me. I will not leave till I talk to Sister Annunziata. It will be on your head."

"They" nearly always talked like this. It was clear that the janitress was beginning to lose her temper. Sister Maria Maddelena said, "Wait," and disappeared through a little door behind the table where she had been sitting, and Signora Bardelli, feeling she had put to rout the entire Church of Rome, seated herself solemnly on a bench against the grey wall beneath the solitary crucifix, a Christ that was elegant and prettified, half-clad in purple and crimson garments with a crown of thorns that was gilded.

When the door opened again Sister Maria Maddelena was followed by a tall malformed figure who was forced to stoop a little to pass through the archway. It was Sister Annunziata. She was rather a grotesque than a woman and her ugliness made her seem no age at all, although you would have guessed that she was forty-five. She had high cheek-bones and a long enormous nose and one eye turned outward a little so that it was impossible to know when she was looking at you. Her great hands hung suspended from fantastically long arms. The nun's dress suited her better than any other. One is not taught to look for beauty as the first quality of a nun. She seemed pale and tired.

At sight of her Signora Bardelli rose politely and greeted her. The manner of open hostility melted away. She told her story—how the strange old woman who had lived with her for sixteen years was ill and perhaps dying. Signora Bardelli had