Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/269

 them in secret for years while she lived on the bounty of her doting Aunt Henrietta. And to go away without a word, not even telling her Aunt Henrietta she had gone.

"But she will return," she kept telling herself. "She will return in good time, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow. What is there for her to do but to return?"

And when she returned she would be more controllable than before. After her ingratitude and treachery she would seek to do penance. Perhaps it would be better in the end. If there was a divine law, people suffered for such behavior.

"I must not think evil thoughts," she told herself, "because evil thoughts make us old and tired and bring on the twilight."

No, she would be sweet and forgiving when Gertrude returned; sweet and forgiving, she repeated to herself, but firm as well. She must not give in too easily.

Suddenly it occurred to her that her misfortune might have to do with the strange statue found in the cesspool. From the very beginning she had disliked it as an obscene and disturbing thing, and now since Miss Fosdick was gone and there was no other object at hand on which to vent her ill temper she began to hate the statue. There was no doubt that such an image aroused the lower nature. It was perhaps the sight of it that had caused Gertrude to behave in so idiotic a fashion with the Duke of Fonterrabia. Perhaps it was the statue that had driven her to run off like a madwoman. She might, she thought, give the statue to a museum, or, what