Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/246

 father at Venterollo. Faustino had troubled himself to write her these things, but from her sisters and from her mother and father, who were long since dead, she had heard nothing. When they put her into a convent at sixteen they had forgotten her as if she had never existed. Afterwards her mother in speaking of her family spoke of "my son and five daughters," as if Eugenia Beatrice had never existed at all. As a little girl she had never been allowed to see visitors who came to Venterollo. She was always kept out of sight with the gardener's wife in the little house by the river.

So as a child she had played alone most of the time because she was years younger than her sisters and because they were proud and showed her that they did not want her about them. She had come to make friends with the birds and the animals in the park of Venterollo and to spend her days like a wild thing under the ancient oaks and moss-grown decaying walls.

She was twelve years old when she understood what it was that caused them all to treat her differently. She had been sitting quietly one day on a little copse near the ruined pavilion watching a troop of ants building a city, when she heard voices, which she recognized as those of her mother and of her aunt. They were devout women who went every day to mass, and that day because it was hot they had stopped on their way home to rest in the pavilion. Her mother was crying because there was no money to marry off her five daughters. Two were already grown and on their way to being old maids. Her husband had only debts and would not