Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/313

 

Father d'Astier never saw her again, and after that people said that he had suddenly grown old. The women whom he had once entertained by his wit and helped with his worldly advice and solaced by his spiritual comfort no longer found him either interesting or good company. He ceased to be amused by their vanities and even while they were talking to him his gaze would have a strange way of wandering off as if in search of something or someone whom he would never find. At times he would pull himself up with a great effort and try again to be what he had once been, but in the end he was too weary. People who had once included him in dinners and week-ends began to neglect him. He went about bravely as usual in search of converts, following the season from London to Venice, to Paris, to Vienna, but clearly there was no longer any heart in his journeys.

And so he came one night in July to be staying with the head of a great English Roman Catholic family. There had been people for dinner and after dinner, feeling a hunger to be alone, he withdrew into the great library where the old Duke kept his famous collection. There he left the other men and hid himself behind a great globe mounted in silver and mahogany to turn quietly, half-dreaming, the pages of an eighteenth century translation of Horace. And presently when he had wearied of reading he allowed the book to slip into his lap and sat with his eyes closed. It was through the mists of sleep that he became aware of the voices. 