"No . . . I will not stay here any longer. I have enough of this torment . . . enough . . . ." "Are you going to your aunt's house?" Janina was sunk in thought for a moment, but suddenly her gloomy face brightened with a flash of determination. "I will go and join the theater. The die is cast! . . ." Krenska glanced at her sharply. "Come, help me pack my trunk. I will leave on the next train." "The next passenger train does not go to Kielce." "It doesn't matter. I will go to Strzemieszyce, and from there, by the Viennese line to Warsaw. . . ." "If I were you, Janina, I'd think it over. . . . Later you may regret it. . . ." "What's done can't be undone! . . ." And without paying any further attention to Krenska's remarks, Janina began to pack. Her lingerie, her dresses, her books and notes, and various trifles she carefully folded away into her school-day trunk, as though she were returning from her vacation. At the end she bade farewell to Krenska indifferently. Outwardly she appeared calm and cool, while a slight tremor of her lips alone, and an inner tremor that she could not still, were the only traces of the storm. She ordered her things carried downstairs, and, having still an hour's time, she went to the woods. "Forever . . ." she said in a subdued tone, as though addressing the trees that seemed to bend toward her with a mournful murmur and rustling of their leaves. "Forever! . . ." she whispered, gazing at the crimson gleams of the setting sun that filtered through the tangled branches of the beeches and shone upon the ground. The woods seemed wrapt in a great silence, as though they were listening to her words of final farewell and dumbly wondering how one who had been born and reared in their midst, who had lived with their life, who had dreamed so many dreams in their embracing silence, could bid farewell. The trees murmured mournfully. A sigh like a song of farewell and a sad reproach echoed through the wood. The ferns stirred with a gentle motion, the young hazel leaves fluttered restlessly, the pines rustled softly with their slender needles the whole wood trembled and became alive with a prolonged moan. The song of the birds sounded in broken, startled little snatches, while over the sky, and over the earth carpeted with leaves and golden mosses and snowy valley-lilies, and through the whole verdant wood there flitted mysterious shadows, sounds and calls like the echo of sorrowful sobbing. "Stay with me! . . . Stay!" the wood seemed to say. The torrent roared noisily, swept away the broken boughs that impeded its course, circled and descended in a cloud of foam, a cascade of mist shining in the sun with all the colors of the rainbow; it went irresistibly onward, triumphantly, whispering: "Go! . . . Go!" Then there followed a great silence, broken only by the hum of insects and the dull clatter of falling acorns. "Forever! . . ." whispered Janina.