Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/56

 appear into the copse of myrtle and ivy and laburnum. At the end of the drive, when they had passed between the panthers and the fauns, he turned again and there on the terrace beyond the room where they had been sitting a little while before stood Mrs. Weatherby. In the thin moonlight she would have been invisible save for the whiteness of her gown. He thought she stood with her arms held outstretched toward the sky, but he could not make certain. The car suddenly shot ahead with a wild roar. The Princess drove as if she were a mad woman.

The ride back to Brinoë was much quicker, but no less free from discomfort, than the ride out in the fiacre. It was only a different sort of discomfort. Winnery, who never rode in motors because he could not afford it, felt that he was being shot through Italy in a cannon-ball. There was no dust this time, for the dust was left far behind, and even the dust which remained on his clothes was blown away by the very speed at which the big car hurtled along the narrow roads. In Monte Salvatore and beyond, the Princess set the strident German horn to shrieking at each wall and turning. It was as if all the violence of a wild, undisciplined nature had been loosed. The big Grebel lights ate through dust and darkness alike and presently Brinoë lay below them huddled in the tight little valley and glowing faintly in the moonlight, covered by a thick canopy of heat and dust. The wind from Africa still blew.

Once inside the city the Princess was forced to