. . I came for a drink of water," answered Janina with a
choking voice, after a long while, nervously pressing the bottle to
her breast. The servant indistinctly mumbled something and did not
speak again.

Janina ran to her room, as though pursued by the furies of madness,
no longer caring whether anyone heard her or might awaken and,
having reached it, locked the door and only then collapsed, half
dead from, exhaustion and trembled so violently that she thought she
would fall to pieces. The tears, which she did not even feel, began
to stream down her face. They gave her so great a relief that she
fell asleep. In the morning Sowinska again reminded her that it was
time to move and, brutally opening the door before her, told her to
get out. Janina dressed hastily and, without answering a word, left
the house.

She walked along the streets, feeling nothing but her homelessness
and that dizziness in her head which was engulfing all her thoughts.
She passed through Nowy Swiat and the Ujazdowskie Allees and did not
stop until she reached the lake in Lazienki Park.

The trees stood dying and their yellow leaves spread a golden carpet
over the paths. The tranquillity of an autumn day hung in the air
and only now and then a flock of sparrows flew by with a noisy
twitter, or the swans upon the lake cried out mournfully and beat
with their wings the muddy-green water that looked like worn velvet.
All around could be seen the destruction wrought by the hand of
golden autumn. Wherever it touched the trees, there the leaves
withered and fell to the ground, the grass dried up and the last
autumn asters bent their lifeless heads and dripped with dew, as
though weeping tears after death.

"Death!" whispered Janina, pressing in her hands the bottle that she
had secured on the previous night and she sat down, perhaps on the
same bench on which she had sat that spring. It seemed to her that
she was slowly drowsing away and that her thoughts were fading, for
her consciousness had begun to disintegrate and she was already
ceasing to feel and to know. Everything was falling away from her
and dying, like the nature about her that also seemed to be burning
out and drawing its last breath.

A rapturous feeling, full of peace and calm, filled Janina's heart,
for the entire past was vanishing from her memory; all her miseries,
all her disappointments, and all her struggles faded away, paled and
dispersed, as though absorbed by that pale a