Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/288

 lonely valley and far off, dimly seen through the haze of heat, he discerned the dark grove of trees which marked the Villa Leonardo. 

HE did not know how Miss Annie Spragg had come to take lodgings in the Palazzo Gonfarini. The old maid was already installed when Signora Bardelli took over the post of janitress on the death of the old man who had preceded her as caretaker. Miss Annie Spragg was already established and a fixture she remained. She was not a troublesome tenant. She did not, like some of Signora Bardelli's lodgers, return home drunk or beat her children or stab indiscriminately the other lodgers. She seemed to have no wants and in all the years she lived there she had never made a complaint. She was very clean and seemed content with a room which contained only a bed, a chair and a washstand. She always paid her rent regularly until three weeks before her death, and then, of course, she could not pay it because her money had come to an end. Where this money had come from Signora Bardelli did not know. Miss Annie Spragg had never in all the years she had lived in the Palazzo Gonfarini received a letter. She had no friends and much of her time was spent in the churches, mainly at San Giovanni before the celebrated paintings of Saint John the Shepherd. She had learned to speak a