Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/318

 duct," read the last florid sentence of the brief account, "that our leader and our sacred Italy are preserved daily from the corruptions of those who would destroy both. It is hoped that the watchful young men will be properly rewarded for their service."

Father d'Astier closed his eyes and leaned back in the heat of the compartment. "Communism," he thought. "Poor Fulco had probably never heard of Communism." They had killed him for preaching what Christ taught.

In another day they would have made him a martyr and a saint.

That night when he arrived at Brinoë he went to the two bare small rooms and taking a few books from them he locked the door, and hiring a fiacre, drove up the long hill to Monte Salvatore. They were awaiting him for he had sent a telegram ahead from Bologna. Inside the monastery they told him that the Principessa d'Orobelli had not returned to the Villa Leonardo. She had leased it, they said, to some English people named Winnery who were recently married. For a moment Father d'Astier wondered whether it could be the pompous and common little man he had met on the day they found the statue in the garden, and then he told himself that a man like Mr. Winnery would scarcely be enjoying a honeymoon at his age. From the window of his room high up in the monastery above the house of Signora Bardelli, Father d'Astier could see the distant lights of the villa twinkling like stars in the darkness. He knew what he had known all along, that she would never return there.