drawing her down into
a dark abyss and that this was death and the end of everything.

Later, Janina no longer heard anything that was being said and saw
no one but the dying woman. At moments, she still felt a desire to
spring up and run away from there but it was a mere flicker of will
that passed through her nerves without reaching her consciousness.

So many previous sufferings, and now this blow at her very heart,
benumbed her brain with a quiet madness. She grew frightfully pale
and sat as though dead, gazing at the face of the dying woman. Those
same fragments of thoughts and visions now swarmed through her brain
that had done so once before: that same vast mass of greenish waters
seemed to submerge her consciousness. She was not even aware that
they had torn her away from Niedzielska and shoved her into a corner
where she stood immovable and bereft of her senses.

Niedzielska was dying. It seemed as though she had only been waiting
for Janina before giving herself up to death, for anger and hatred
kept her alive a few hours longer. Now, there followed a general
dissolution. She lay there rigid and straight, with her hands upon
the coverlet, which they tugged at automatically, and with her sad
eyes gazing upward as though into the eternity into which she was
entering.

The consecrated candle shed a yellowish light upon her face
impearled with the sweat of her last struggle and death agony. Her
gray hair, scattered in a disheveled mass upon the pillow, formed a
sort of background upon which appeared in sharper relief her
withered head, shaking with the unconscious and frightful
convulsions of death. She breathed heavily and slowly and gasped
with effort, catching the air with her pale lips. At moments her
face would writhe and her mouth twitch with a dreadful spasm of pain
and she would raise her hands as though she wanted to tear apart her
throat to get more air. Her white and fever-coated tongue slipped
spasmodically from her mouth and so tense did her body become in the
struggle with death that the veins stood out like black whip cords
on; her temples and throat.

The silence was full of weeping and sobbing of those kneeling about
and the awful groans of the dying woman. Feverishly whispered
prayers, tear-streaming eyes, the sobbing of the servant and the
children filled the room with an atmosphere of dreadful and
overwhelming tragedy. The dark shadows at the farther end of the
room trembled as though e