very strong accent asked: "Where is Wladek?"

Her brows knit themselves in an expression of severity and something
like hatred gleamed in the yellowish whites of her eyes.

"I don't know. How am I to know?" answered Janina almost frightened
by her question.

"You don't know, you thief! You have stolen my son and yet, you dare
tell me that you don't know!" gasped Niedzielska, striving to raise
her voice a little, but it sounded hollow and wild. Her eyes opened
ever wider and gleamed with hatred and menace, her pale lips
quivered nervously, and her thin, yellow face twitched continually.
She raised herself a bit on her bed and in a hoarse voice, as though
rallying her remaining strength cried: "You streetwalker! You thief!
You . . ." and she fell back exhausted, with a hollow groan.

Janina sprang up, as though an electric shock had passed through
her, but the old woman gripped her wrist so tightly that she fell
back again on her chair, unable to free her hand. She glanced about
desperately at everybody, in the room, but their faces were stern.
She closed her eyes for a moment to shut out the sight of the
yellowish wrinkled faces of those women who stood facing her like
specters glaring at her with their skeleton-like faces in the
shadowy twilight of the room.

"So that is she! So young and already . . ."

"A base serpent."

"I would kill her like a dog, if she tried to do the same with my
son."

"I would have her locked up and sent to the workhouse."

"In my days such women as that were put into the pillory as a
punishment. I remember well."

"Be quiet! quiet!" whispered an old man trying to pacify the women.

"And for her he ran away to the comedians, for her he squandered so
much money, for such a low-down thing as she, he beat his mother!
May you perish, you base serpent!"

Such were the voices full of hatred and scorn that hissed all about
Janina and the poisonous malignity that dripped from their words and
glances flooded her heart with an ocean of pain and shame. She
wanted to cry out: "Mercy, people! I am innocent," but her head bent
ever lower on her breast and she had an ever dimmer consciousness of
where she was and what was happening to her. Janina's soul had
already been weakened too much by misery to resist this blow. An
immense wave of fear began to shake her, for it seemed to her that
the hand of the old woman which held her so tightly and those
dreadful eyes bulging from their sockets were