Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/317

 He was tired, but not too tired to make a resolution. He would go back to Italy tomorrow and go from town to town, searching out Fulco, and when he had found Fulco he would reason with him to return to the Church. He would even use his influence to help him and he would tell Fulco that he was his son and the only relative who remained in the world. Together they would perhaps work something out and when that was done he would retire into the monastery at Monte Salvatore and never come out again, not even in death. They could bury him in the end in the warm sunny garden above the valley. The old conflict in his ravaged soul seemed dead at last. The Church was his mother to whom he might return now that he had finished with life. The world had nothing better to offer. And he was tired of this world.

He left suddenly saying that he had been called back to Brinoë on business of the Church. It was in Bologna while his train was awaiting the train from Venice that he bought the newspaper and read the small paragraph at the bottom of the page. In Milan, said the paper, a man later identified as a renegade priest named Baldessare had been found on a street corner preaching Communism, and twelve vigilant and heroic young men in black shirts had pulled him down from the steps where he was speaking and beaten him and dosed him with castor oil. The offender had died the same night of his injuries. "It is by such vigilance and heroic con-