Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/260

 in the midst of it stood Saint Francis in a tiny field of buttercups and primroses, surrounded by all the little birds that a little time before had fluttered about the room. From his body there streamed great rays of light. These appeared to come from his hands and his feet, his side and his brow, where there were wounds like those of Our Lord. The light streamed toward the body of the dead woman. After that she could remember no more.

As she told the story a strange unearthly look of happy madness came into her face, so that even the hard Signora Bardelli felt a sudden awe.

Before noon the story of the miracle had traveled through all the quarter and crowds came streaming into the cortile, up the staircase and along the corridor. Pushing and crying out hysterically, women thrust themselves into the chamber of the dead woman and there tore her clothes and the very chair and table into bits as relics. They bore off the cages of the little birds, and the night light, and one woman soaked her shawl in the water that was in the bowl of cheap blue crockery. In their hunger for relics they snatched the bedraggled roses from the old picture hat and ripped bits from the very sheet that covered the body of Miss Spragg, until only torn fragments remained to hide its nakedness. It was the police who at last cleared them from the house, pushing them rudely back into the street. But the crowd would not go away. It hung about the great arched gateway of the Palazzo Gonfarini and women knelt in the dust to pray beneath the windows.

Through all the confusion and the vulgar turmoil