Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/48

 Winnery felt a little pang of disappointment like the first faint warnings of an approaching indigestion. She seemed to him the only healthy, simple creature in the room.

"But to get on with Miss Spragg," said Mrs. Weatherby. "She always lived a very quiet life and seldom went out except in the evenings. She was always a little queer, but she grew queerer and queerer as she grew middle-aged."

Miss Spragg had occupied, it seemed, with her brother the clergyman, a small wooden house of some six rooms set back from the street in a tangle of lilacs, maple trees and vines in the poorest part of town. Soon after she came there, either she or her brother had a high wooden fence built to enclose the back yard. What went on inside the fence no one knew very clearly, but it became known gradually that it concealed a weird collection of animals. The old maid, people said, was very fond of them. There were guinea-pigs, rabbits, cats, a pair of decrepit dogs, and at one period, Mrs. Weatherby heard, even a skunk. The thick trees about the house were alive with birds and they came from all over the town to be fed within the enclosure.

"That," interrupted Father d'Astier, "would perhaps explain her having chosen Saint Francis of Assisi for special adoration in her old age."

"It was Saint John the Shepherd," put in Mr. Winnery; and then with a burst of Non-Conformist emotion, "who in the Roman church is merely a survival of the pagan Dionysus."

Mrs. Weatherby ignored the comment, perhaps because she had no idea of Saint Francis, of Saint