Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/298

 have been told that things like that are the oldest things in the world."

She was stubborn and would not be shaken from her beliefs into the admission that her sister-in-law and her husband might have imagined such a story, or that there had really been none of the marks of the Stigmata on the body of Miss Annie Spragg. She had seen the scars with her own eyes.

A figure suddenly filled the doorway, throwing a blue shadow across the earthen floor. It was a tall, heavy woman, a peasant with a light shawl thrown over her head to keep off the sun. She spoke to Signora Bardelli. She had walked down from the mountains twenty-seven miles to sleep in the bed of Miss Annie Spragg. She had been married for thirteen years and had never had a child.

Mr. Winnery, with a sense of intruding a second time upon a delicate situation, rose and gave Signora Bardelli ten lira for the consultation. Then he bade her good-by, aware that she had disapproved of him as one who sought to meddle in things he could not understand. The tall heavy peasant woman sat wearily down on the chair he had left, and he walked out again into the blazing square where the battered fiacre and the bony horses stood waiting for him in the shadow of an enormous fig tree. For a moment the light blinded him. He felt weary and hot. And then he saw the deep cool valley of Monte Salvatore coming into form and on its side the distant black patch of cypresses that marked the Villa Leonardo.

A sense of the immense futility of everything swept over him and he thought, "Why should I