Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/328

 And then half-credulously, he added, "Perhaps the story told by the Prophet's son, Obadiah Spragg, was true. Perhaps Cyrus Spragg simply disappeared."

He told Mrs. Winnery that the whole affair appeared hopelessly muddled and inexplicable, and that the solution was scarcely worth any further expenditure of his valuable time. Secretly he had a sense of it pointing toward something but what this was he could not say. He did not tell Mrs. Winnery that in attempting to solve one mystery he had simply confronted another and more terrifying one which neither scientists nor prophets nor saints had ever solved in all the centuries of the world's recorded existence. It made Mr. Winnery seem to himself small and insignificant and impertinent, and being a vain man, he did not care to have his wife share this discovery.

Out of all the muddle only one thing seemed to emerge clearly—that there was in the affair the evidence of some colossal struggle between all that was Christian and all that which Signora Bardelli described as "older than the church, older than Christianity itself" and that humanity was the battle ground upon which the two ancient elements waged their colossal and endless conflict. The Church of Rome, he thought (though he did not confide this even to Mrs. Winnery), was right just as it had been right in the question of Miss Annie Spragg's