So many previous sufferings, and now this blow at her very heart, benumbed her brain with a quiet madness. She grew frightfully pale and sat as though dead, gazing at the face of the dying woman. Those same fragments of thoughts and visions now swarmed through her brain that had done so once before: that same vast mass of greenish waters seemed to submerge her consciousness. She was not even aware that they had torn her away from Niedzielska and shoved her into a corner where she stood immovable and bereft of her senses. Niedzielska was dying. It seemed as though she had only been waiting for Janina before giving herself up to death, for anger and hatred kept her alive a few hours longer. Now, there followed a general dissolution. She lay there rigid and straight, with her hands upon the coverlet, which they tugged at automatically, and with her sad eyes gazing upward as though into the eternity into which she was entering. The consecrated candle shed a yellowish light upon her face impearled with the sweat of her last struggle and death agony. Her gray hair, scattered in a disheveled mass upon the pillow, formed a sort of background upon which appeared in sharper relief her withered head, shaking with the unconscious and frightful convulsions of death. She breathed heavily and slowly and gasped with effort, catching the air with her pale lips. At moments her face would writhe and her mouth twitch with a dreadful spasm of pain and she would raise her hands as though she wanted to tear apart her throat to get more air. Her white and fever-coated tongue slipped spasmodically from her mouth and so tense did her body become in the struggle with death that the veins stood out like black whip cords on; her temples and throat. The silence was full of weeping and sobbing of those kneeling about and the awful groans of the dying woman. Feverishly whispered prayers, tear-streaming eyes, the sobbing of the servant and the children filled the room with an atmosphere of dreadful and overwhelming tragedy. The dark shadows at the farther end of the room trembled as though engulfing it all. The candles diffused a yellowish, ghastly light that seemed to steep everything in boundless grief. The room filled up completely with kneeling people and only she, who lay there rigid, unconscious, and dying, reigned from the throne of death over that bowed throng begging for mercy. An old man with silvery gray hair made his way to the bed, knelt down, took a prayer book from his pocket and, by the light of the candle, began to read the Penitential Psalms. He had a clear and melodious voice and the words of the psalms, like a murmuring rainbow, or like flashes of lightning full of terror, tears, might, and heavenly grace, floated above the heads of all those present: "Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are vexed." "Thou art my hiding place; Thou shalt preserve me from trouble . . ."