Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/300

 fore the door. The white flame of yucca set among swords had turned brown and dead and withered away. He got down—it had become a habit with him, as if he were an old friend of the household—and went through the dark tunnel of greenery. The garden had an unkempt look, for the dry heat of early autumn had detached the yellow leaves of the plane trees and left them dead and drifted in little piles along the colonnades of mottled trunks. The grave where the statue had been reburied had sunk now so that there was a little hollow instead of a mound. Then he discovered that the back of the villa presented the same appearance as the front. It was closed. Every door and shutter was fastened. They had gone away (he saw) and Miss Fosdick was perhaps lost forever.

With the malacca stick he pounded on the door. A kind of recklessness entered his soul. He called out the name of Miss Fosdick but no one answered. He was about to leave when he saw emerging from the decaying stables the abundant figure of Margharita. The girl came toward him and when she was near enough to speak she said that Signora Wetterbee had gone away, not only for this season but forever. She did not know where she had gone but she supposed she had gone back to her house in Brinoë. When he asked her why she had gone away the girl said that she had taken a dislike to the place. The villa itself had been sold over Signora Wetterbee's head. The truth, she added, was that she had been driven out.

It was all the doing of the statue, she said. It ought never to have been buried again. It was tak-