Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/262

 beside someone like old Mrs. Whitehead. He could now travel everywhere and anywhere, always seeking with the bright hope of an incurable romantic some spot that would be as paradisiacal as it was reported to be by poets and old ladies and tourist circulars. Aunt Bessie was dead, God bless her.

He rose, and before doing the exercises which kept his waist measure within moderation, and his liver in action, he went to the window and looked out. Below him in the little square the usual things were going on. There were bony horses and cab drivers in varnished leather hats, three English ladies in tweeds and picture hats, armed with umbrellas, Baedekers and cameras. An elderly American couple reading out of a book about the tower of the church opposite. They read a paragraph and then regarded the tower again, as if uncertain which things had been regarded by Mr. Ruskin as beautiful and which things had not. A brown-robed monk came down from the high monastery of Monte Salvatore. A herd of goats with the shepherd in a black smock playing a tune on a strange pipe held in the hollow of his hand. A Ford automobile with nine Italians. Though it was early morning they were dressed in full evening clothes, clearly bound for a wedding or a christening. A woman leaned out of a window and screamed at the goatherd. He halted the flock, put away the pipe and set himself industriously to milking one of the she-goats.

It was a delightful place, after all, Brinoë. Perhaps it wasn't as bad as he had thought. Now that he was rich he could keep a larger apartment and have a villa somewhere in the hills. Suddenly it