Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/286

 a successful surgeon that from now on everything would be all right.

It was a small room in one of the bilious yellow houses of Monte Salvatore and it stood on the slope of the hill overlooking the lonely valley where the Villa Leonardo perched in its decaying and lonely splendor. In the evening the very shadow of the monastery fell across its doorstep. Unwilling to intrude upon the delicate transactions that were taking place, Mr. Winnery waited just outside the door.

He heard the former janitress giving the young woman earnest advice. Then he heard her selling for ten lira a mixture composed, she said, of amber, laurel and a powder made from the hill viper. This the young woman was to put into her husband's wine every night for seven nights following the next change of the moon. And she sold a charm containing a phial of powder (composition undescribed during the transaction) which she was to wear suspended between her two breasts. If nothing happened within three months Signora Bardelli advised returning to spend another night in the bed of Signorina Spragg. Some cases, she pointed out, were more difficult than others. It all sounded, thought Mr. Winnery, rather like the last consultation he had had with the expensive Doctor Gosse on the subject of his liver.

Then the peasant woman departed and Mr. Winnery brightly made his entrance. He planned to take Signora Bardelli directly into his confidence and so let her understand that he knew she was a shrewd and clever swindler. 