en lace of her waist and, groaning with painful anxiety,
counted in her mind the number of copecks which her partner placed
together with the notes beside her. The pianist again struck the
keys and Wolska and her partner began to sing together some comic
couplets, interwoven with a kind of "Krakowiak" which they danced in
a half dreamy manner.

Janina could hardly wait for the end of the performance and, without
saying anything about the impression that that drinking den had made
on her, she took leave of Wolska and fairly ran away from that
garden, that public, and that degradation.

During the entire day following, she did not leave her home. She ate
nothing and hardly thought at all, but lay in bed and gazed blankly
at the ceiling, following with her eyes, the last fly that crept
drowsily and half dead over it.

In the evening, Sowinska came in, sat down on a trunk and, without
any introduction, said harshly: "The room is already rented to
another tenant, so to-morrow you can clear out of here. And since
you owe us fifteen rubles, I will keep all your duds and give them
back to you only when you pay me the money."

"Very well," answered Janina and she looked at Sowinska
indifferently, as though nothing out of the ordinary were at stake.
"Very well, I shall go!" she added in a quieter tone and arose from
the bed.

"You will doubtlessly manage to help yourself in some way, won't
you? You will yet come to see me in a carriage, eh?" said Sowinska
and an ugly, hostile light gleamed in her owlish eyes.

"Very well," repeated Janina in the same mechanical way and began to
pace up and down the room.

Sowinska, growing tired of waiting for some kind of reply, left the
room.

"So all is ended!" whispered Janina in a hollow voice and the
thought of death became a conscious reality in her mind and shone
alluringly.

"What is death? A forgetting, a forgetting!" she answered herself
aloud, standing still and sinking her eyes in those murky deeps that
opened up before her soul.

"Yes, a forgetting, a forgetting!" she repeated slowly and for a
long time sat motionless, gazing at the flame of the lamp.

The night dragged on slowly, the house became quiet, the lights were
gradually extinguished in the long rows of windows and an ever
deeper silence spread itself about, until everything became steeped
in this drowsy silence.

The gray light of dawn was already beginning to streak the horizon
and to illumine the faint