Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/53

 She made it clear none the less by some skilful intonation of her voice or expression in her eyes that she had really found it a boring tale badly told and not worth the trip to the Villa Leonardo.

Mrs. Weatherby became a miracle of graciousness and, bidding them all good-by, murmured, "I must have a word with Father d'Astier."

Winnery would have gone into the hall with the Princess, but he remembered that Miss Fosdick, forgotten and ungraceful, was lingering in the shadows. He turned to speak to her and found that she was coming toward him in order to light them out. At the same moment he heard Mrs. Weatherby murmuring something to the priest. He was able to catch only two words—"prayer and meditation"—and began to think that he had gone mad.

"You will have to go out by the garden," Mrs. Weatherby was saying. "Margharita has stupidly lost the key to the main door and no locksmith will come from Brinoë until the end of the week."

They moved down the hallway between dark rooms, from one of which came the muffled indignant squawking of the parrot Anubis, King of Darkness. Winnery had taken the candlestick from the frightened Miss Fosdick and was heading the little procession. In the garden the light still filtered in between the black trunks of the gigantic cypresses, but it was a different light now, feeble and blue and diffused, the light from a hot waning moon that had risen above the mountains on the opposite side of the valley. Far away, at the end of one of the tunnels made by the plantain trees, the statue, scrubbed white now by the strong brown hands of Giovanni,