n it . . ." she repeated to herself.

She walked along the almost empty streets. The gas-lamps cast a
ghastly, yellowish glare like that of funeral tapers on the silent
and deserted thoroughfares and alleys. The dark-blue vault of the
sky hung over the city like a huge canopy embroidered with brightly
scintillating stars. A cool breeze swept down the streets and
chilled Janina to the marrow.

"Go and earn it!" she again repeated to herself, passing before the
Grand Theater. She had come here without being aware of it.

Janina glanced at the building and turned back. An unbearable pain
racked her head, as though there was a burning iron ring about it.
She was so utterly weak and worn-out that at moments she could
scarcely resist the desire to sit down on the curbstone and remain
there. Then again, so desperate a realization of her poverty filled
her that she was almost ready to give herself to anyone who might
ask, if she could only relieve that agonized trembling within
herself, that almost deathly weakness and exhaustion.

She dragged herself heavily along the streets, for she no longer
knew what to do, and the chill night air, the silence, and that
deathly weariness gave her a sort of painful ecstasy. Before her
eyes there hovered only phantom forms and fiery spots, so that she
knew not where she was or what was happening to her. She felt only
one thing and that was that she would no longer be able to endure
it.

"What am I going to do further?" Janina asked thoughtlessly, looking
before herself.

The silence of the sleeping city and the silence of the dark heavens
seemed to be the only answer to her question.

Janina felt as though she were falling swiftly down a steep incline
and that there, at the very bottom, lay the outstretched corpse of
Niedzielska.

"Death!" she answered herself. "Death!" and she gazed fixedly at
that dead face with the congealed tears on its cheeks, and not fear,
but an immense silence enveloped her soul.

She looked all about her as though she were seeking for the cause of
that deep silence at her side.

Then, she began thinking of her father, of the theater, and of
herself, but as though they were things which she had only seen or
read about.

"What am I going to do?" Janina asked herself aloud after she had
returned home. It was impossible for her to see or even to imagine
what the morrow would be like.

"In this condition I can't go to the theater, I can't go anywhere.
B