Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/245

 

It was a quarter in which Sister Annunziata knew every door and every window, every cornice. She knew even the holes in the pavement, which had never been repaired in the twenty-nine years she had spent going from house to house where she was needed. She did not, like Sister Maria Maddelena, think in secret pride of these poor sleeping all about her as "they." To Sister Annunziata this was all of the world, its beginning and its end. She had lived in it so long, absorbed by its pain and sorrows, that she had long ago forgotten she had ever belonged in any other. She had forgotten too because this life had been happy and the other had never held any happiness.

She quite forgot that she was born Eugenia Beatrice d'Orobelli. Among the poor it was said that she belonged to a proud family, but long ago "they" too had forgotten, if they ever knew, what she had been in the world. She was simply Sister Annunziata whom "they" always asked for. Sometimes they called her, behind her back, The Ugly One, and sometimes The Mad One, but there was in both names a kind of affection of that simple quality which colors the feelings of the humble.

In twenty-nine years she had seen none of her family save Faustino, her only brother, and him she had seen only twice when he had come from Venterollo with family papers for her to sign. She knew that he had married an American woman and she knew that he had three sons, one of whom, the eldest, was an invalid and lived always with his