Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/299

 trouble myself about these things? Let them believe what they like. That peasant woman is happier in the hope that a night on the Spragg woman's bed will give her the power of bringing more brats into an over-crowded world. She is happier than if she had stayed in her village without any hope. Life is short and I have wasted most of it. It is time that I began to bring my life to something."

Suddenly he wasn't interested in miracles and other natural phenomena. He wanted to see Miss Fosdick. The heat, the smell of the fig tree, the sight of the former janitress doing her best to make the world a fertile place made him feel languorous. He became the prey of his own imagination. He, a respectable man of fifty-three who had led a virginal existence, was becoming amorous.

He wakened the sleeping driver and said, "Go to the Villa Leonardo." And pointing with the malacca stick he had purchased to celebrate the passing of Aunt Bessie and the beginning of his courtship he added, "It is yonder. That patch of cypresses."

He would face Mrs. Weatherby again and tell her the truth—that he proposed to marry her companion, and that nothing could stop him, not even the famous twenty years of devotion.

As he drove up the long avenue between the rows of grotesque and ancient oaks he was stirred again by the villa's sense of loneliness and utter isolation. The windows were again tightly shuttered and this time there was no red and black motor standing be-