Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/62

 farini, through crooked narrow streets, filled with rubbish and smells, where shadows seemed thicker than shadows should have been. The crowd before the battered doors of the old palace had thinned a little, but there were still people there, gossiping and looking up toward the window just beneath the eaves, and near the doorway there were three devout women kneeling in the dust beneath the room of the mysterious old maid who would be buried tomorrow.

All the way from the Gonfarini Palace to his own flat Mr. Winnery turned over in his mind the power of superstition, against which all the logic and the intelligence in the world appeared to make no progress. There were things which science could not yet explain, but some day it would explain all and then in a moment of triumph superstition, religions, churches, all would be swept away and man liberated to command his own destiny untrammeled by dark heritages of the past. Some day he would finish his book. For the moment he had at hand splendid material, a laboratory, as it were, a perfect specimen in the case of Miss Annie Spragg. He would go deeper and deeper into her story. Mrs. Weatherby had not told everything. Clearly she knew things she had chosen for some reason not to tell.

His own flat was dark and after he had turned on the light and turned down his bed, he discovered that the charwoman had thrust a telegram under the door. It might, he thought, have come from the editor of the Ladies' Own World asking for in-