Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/258

 "But she is not an old woman." And once more the great bony hand reached out with a gesture of reverence and envy to touch the beauty of the dead woman's hair.

As she set about her task with dim near-sighted eyes, she saw that the body of the dead woman was not old and that it was beautifully made and that in youth it had been superb. She saw that it was a body which perhaps had known the love which was shut out forever from the life of a nun. She had seen bodies many times that were young and splendid even in death when it was no longer wrong to look upon their nakedness, and each time it gave her a kind of twisting, sickening pain, so that in the end she had come to look away from them.

As she worked with averted eyes she tried to repeat the psalms she had learned as a child at Venterollo, but in her trouble and in the pain that racked her body and the clouds that obscured her thoughts she could not remember them. When she had nearly finished her task she discovered that she had not removed the white cotton gloves that covered the hands. She removed first one and then the other and then quite suddenly she made the discovery. On the palm of each hand there was a red scar as if both hands had been pierced by nails. For a moment she stared in silence, leaning close in order to see, and then gently, with a gesture almost of terror, she pushed back the fringe of hair that covered the brow of the dead woman, and there on the brow she discovered other scars as if a crown of thorns had been pressed upon her head. There was