to go up. On her way she went into the kitchen, and took a thick cord
from a sugar-loaf.

As she passed by Daniel's room, she noticed that the door was half open.
He was still playing. Two candles were standing on the piano; Eleanore
was leaning up against the side of the piano. She had on a pale blue
dress that fell down over her beautiful body in peaceful folds.

Gertrude looked at the picture with wide-open eyes. There was an
inimitable urging, a reaching aloft, and a painful sinking-back in the
piece he was playing and in the way he was playing it. Gertrude went on
up without making the slightest bit of noise. It was dark, but she found
her way by feeling along with her hands.

XIX

After a half-hour had gone by, Philippina began to wonder where Gertrude
was. She looked in the living room, then in Eleanore's room, and then
hastened up the steps and peeped through the open door into Daniel's
room. Daniel had stopped playing and was talking with Eleanore.
Philippina turned back. On the stairs she met Jordan just then coming in
from his evening walk. She lighted a candle, and looked in the kitchen.
Gertrude was nowhere to be found.

"It is raining; there is her raincoat, and here is her umbrella, so she
can't have gone out," thought Philippina to herself. She sat down on the
kitchen table, and stared before her.

She was filled with an ugly, bitter suspicion; she scented a tragedy. In
the course of another half-hour, she got up, took the lighted candle,
and started out on a second search. Something drove her all about the
house: she went out into the hall, into the various rooms, and then back
to the kitchen.

All of a sudden she thought of the attic. It was the expression on
Gertrude's face the last time she kissed Agnes that made her think of
it. Was not the attic of any house, and particularly the one in this
house, the room that had the greatest attraction for her, and that her
light-fearing fancy invariably chose as the most desirable and befitting
place for her hidden actions?

She went up quickly and without making the least noise. Holding the
lighted candle out before her, she stared at a rafter from which hung a
human figure dressed in woman's clothes. She wheeled about, uttering a
stifled gurgle. A sort of drunkenness came over her; she was seized with
a terrible desire to dance. She raised one leg, and sank her teeth deep
into the nails of her right hand. In her