Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/310

 ing a spot where she might retire from the world. Four bathrooms were installed and much furniture, not furniture like that Mrs. Weatherby had strewn about during her tenancy, but expensive and beautiful pieces that should have been in museums. The old chapel was opened again and put in order for religious ceremonies. There was such a confusion as the old villa had not seen since the great days of the Spanish Ambassador. And at last when the Principessa came herself (dressed handsomely all in black by Worth) to examine the progress of the work she asked what had become of the statue they found in the garden, and Margharita told her that it had been buried again. The Principessa herself superintended the reopening of the grave, but they dug and dug without ever finding a trace of the statue and at last Margharita confessed that she knew all along it was not there. It had already been dug up a second time and carted down the hillside where it was set up in the barren rocky little garden of Pietro the goatherd. The Principessa flew into a wild rage and said that the statue was her own and that she meant to have it. She herself went to Pietro's hut to recover it.

And when the palace was finished Anna d'Orobelli drove one day into Brinoë and sought out Father d'Astier to show him the place she had prepared for her retirement.

It was a warm day in April when the hillside beyond Monte Salvatore was blue with violets and wild hyacinths and the whole valley, that was by nature so bleak and barren, had turned fresh and green from the thin stream at the bottom to the wild