She knew, however, at that very moment that she had done her last washing. There was something so mournful about the light of the lamp. Agnes’s little face looked so pale as it peeped out from under the covers, Philippina cowered so witlessly at the floor. But all this was only for the moment; all this she could take with her up into a better world. She bent down over the child, and kissed it, and kissed it with hot, burning lips. A lurk of unsoftened evil crept into Philippina’s face. “Listen, Gertrude, listen: you are all Greek to me,” said Philippina, “I don’t understand you.” Gertrude went over to Eleanore’s room, where she stood for a while in the dark, trembling and thinking. At times she was startled: she heard some one walking about, and she thought the door would open. She could scarcely endure her impatience. Suddenly she remembered the attic and how quiet it was up there; there no one could disturb her. She decided to go up. On her way she went into the kitchen, and took a thick cord from a sugar-loaf. As she passed by Daniel’s room, she noticed that the door was half open. He was still playing. Two candles were standing on the piano; Eleanore was leaning up against the side of the piano. She had on a pale blue dress that fell down over her beautiful body in peaceful folds. Gertrude looked at the picture with wide-open eyes. There was an inimitable urging, a reaching aloft, and a painful sinking-back in the piece he was playing and in the way he was playing it. Gertrude went on up without making the slightest bit of noise. It was dark, but she found her way by feeling along with her hands. XIX After a half-hour had gone by, Philippina began to wonder where Gertrude was. She looked in the living room, then in Eleanore’s room, and then hastened up the steps and peeped through the open door into Daniel’s room. Daniel had stopped playing and was talking with Eleanore. Philippina turned back. On the stairs she met Jordan just then coming in from his evening walk. She lighted a candle, and looked in the kitchen. Gertrude was nowhere to be found. “It is raining; there is her raincoat, and here is her umbrella, so she can’t have gone out,” thought Philippina to herself. She sat down on the kitchen table, and stared before her. She was filled with an ugly, bitter suspicion; she scented a tragedy. In the course of another half-hour, she got up, took the lighted candle, and started out on a second search. Something drove her all about the house: she went out into the hall, into the various rooms, and then back to the kitchen. All of a sudden she thought of the attic. It was the expression on Gertrude’s face the last time she kissed Agnes that made her think of it. Was not the attic of any house, and particularly the one in this house, the room that had the greatest attraction for her, and that her light-fearing fancy invariably chose as the most desirable and befitting place for her hidden actions?