Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/292

 beat her and try new ways of driving out the demon. When she was eleven she took to accompanying the old maid and the goats when they set out in the morning to feed on the mountainside.

For five years Miss Annie Spragg went each summer to occupy the room over the stable at Bestia and each time when she returned to the Palazzo Gonfarini she brought with her a cage filled with small birds, most of them being a kind of sparrow which frequented the mountains and because of its smallness was worth nothing as food to the peasants. When she left her room in the Palazzo Gonfarini in the spring Miss Annie Spragg opened the window and allowed them to escape. Signora Bardelli believed they were always the same birds. They spent the winter at the Palazzo Gonfarini and flew back in summer to rejoin Miss Annie Spragg at Bestia. Once she even brought back with her a box filled with field mice.

In Bestia they no longer thought her queer. She became a part of the place. They even came to date things by the arrival and the departure of the old maid, as if her coming marked the beginning of summer and her departure the arrival of the long Italian autumn.

She might have continued going summer after summer to Bestia, said Signora Bardelli, but a strange thing happened. One night at midnight her brother-in-law was awakened by the smell of smoke and discovered that the house was burning. At first he believed that it was the demon in Peppina who had set the fire a second time, but when he had awakened all his family he discovered that Peppina