reast.
The child did not separate us.

"We shall be happy," I murmured, and her sigh seemed to answer a
delicious "Yes," when suddenly there came a shock to the partition
against which we leaned and, starting from my clasp, she cried:

"Our duty is in there. Shall we think of ourselves or even of each other
while these men, all relatives of mine, are dying on the other side of
this wall?"

Seizing my hand, she dragged me to the trap; but here I took the lead,
and helped her down the ladder. When I had her safely on the floor at
the foot, she passed in front of me again; but once up the steps and in
front of the kitchen door, I thrust her behind me, for one glance into
the room beyond 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,
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
color 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