eyond had convinced me it was no place for her.

But she would not be held back. She crowded forward beside me, and
together we looked upon the wreck within. It was a never-to-be-forgotten
scene. The demon that was in those men had driven them to demolish
furniture, dishes, everything. In one heap lay what, an hour before, had
been an inviting board surrounded by rollicking and greedy guests. But
it was not upon this overthrow we stopped to look. It was upon something
that mingled with it, dominated it, and made of this chaos only a
setting to awful death. Janet's face, in all its natural hideousness and
depravity, looked up from the floor beside this heap; and farther on,
lay the twisted figure of him they called Hector, with something more
than the seams of greedy longing round his wide-staring eyes and icy
temples. Two in this room! and on the threshold of the one beyond a
moaning third, who sank into eternal silence as we approached; and
before the fireplace in the great room a horrible crescent that had once
been aged Luke, upon whom we had no sooner turned our backs than we
caught glimpses here and there of other prostrate forms which moved
once under our eyes and then moved no more.

One only still stood upright, and he was the man whose obtrusive figure
and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no
colour now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose
false sheen I had seen so much of evil, were glazed now, and his big and
burly frame shook the door it pressed against. He was staring at a small
slip of paper he held, and, from his anxious looks, appeared to miss
something which neither of us had power to supply. It was a spectacle to
make devils rejoice and mortals fly aghast. But Eunice had a spirit like
an angel, and, drawing near him, she said:

"Is there anything I can do for you, Cousin John?"

He started, looked at her with the same blank gaze he had hitherto cast
at the wall, then some words formed on his working lips, and we heard:

"I cannot reckon; I was never good at figures. But if Luke is gone, and
William, and Hector, and Barbara's boy, and Janet, _how much does that
leave for me_?"

He was answered almost the moment he spoke, but it was by other tongues,
and in another world than this. As his body fell forward I tore open the
door before which he had been standing, and, lifting the almost fainting
Eunice in my arms, I carried her out into the night.