Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/284

 fortune that she told him what had happened and where the former janitress could be found.

Signora Bardelli, it appeared, had behaved scandalously. No sooner had the body of Miss Annie Spragg been removed from the Palazzo Gonfarini than the janitress began spreading a singular story. She expressed it as her belief that Miss Annie Spragg was not a holy woman at all but that she had been in alliance with the dark powers of fertility during her entire lifetime. Her relics, said Signora Bardelli, were efficacious in the case of barren women. Although she conceded a belief that any of the relics possessed a certain power, she was convinced that its very center was concentrated in the only piece of furniture left behind by the relic-snatchers—the bed upon which Miss Annie Spragg had died. The act of spending a night in this bed had, she declared, a miraculous effect. She fixed a price of forty lira for the privilege and before Father d'Astier, her employer, discovered the outrage she had already accumulated three customers. And then Father d'Astier had come to the palace in person and had thrown her into the street. But she had taken the miraculous bed with her and she was now living in a tiny house in the village of Monte Salvatore, where she had set it up once more and was doing a good business.

Fate, reflected Mr. Winnery, was always drawing him back to Monte Salvatore.

But before going he went to seek out the fat little Father Baldessare and the gaunt Sister Annunziata to gather from them their version of the miracle. The priest had disappeared completely, none knew