“You must be mistaken,” she answered him. “No one ever lived here. This is a new house. They told us so. They⁠—”

“What have they done with my family?” shouted Jurgis, frantically.

A light had begun to break upon the woman; perhaps she had had doubts of what “they” had told her. “I don’t know where your family is,” she said. “I bought the house only three days ago, and there was nobody here, and they told me it was all new. Do you really mean you had ever rented it?”

“Rented it!” panted Jurgis. “I bought it! I paid for it! I own it! And they⁠—my God, can’t you tell me where my people went?”

She made him understand at last that she knew nothing. Jurgis’s brain was so confused that he could not grasp the situation. It was as if his family had been wiped out of existence; as if they were proving to be dream people, who never had existed at all. He was quite lost⁠—but then suddenly he thought of Grandmother Majauszkiene, who lived in the next block. She would know! He turned and started at a run.

Grandmother Majauszkiene came to the door herself. She cried out when she saw Jurgis, wild-eyed and shaking. Yes, yes, she could tell him. The family had moved; they had not been able to pay the rent and they had been turned out into the snow, and the house had been repainted and sold again the next week. No, she had not heard how they were, but she could tell him that they had gone back to Aniele Jukniene, with whom they had stayed when they first came to the yards. Wouldn’t Jurgis come in and rest? It was certainly too bad⁠—if only he had not got into jail⁠—

And so Jurgis turned and staggered away. He did not go very far⁠—round the corner he gave out completely, and sat down on the steps of a saloon, and hid his face in his hands, and shook all over with dry, racking sobs.

Their home! Their home! They had lost it! Grief, despair, rage, overwhelmed him⁠—what was any imagination of the thing to this heartbreaking, crushing reality of it⁠—to the sight of strange people living in his house, hanging their curtains in his windows, staring at him with hostile eyes! It was monstrous, it was unthinkable⁠—they could not do it⁠—it could not be true! Only think what he had suffered for that house⁠—what miseries they had all suffered for it⁠—the price they had paid for it!

And now, with this last hideous injustice, its time had come, and it had turned them out bag and baggage, and taken their house and sold it again! And they could do nothing, they were tied hand and foot⁠—the law was against them, the whole machinery of society was at their oppressors’ command! If Jurgis so much as raised a hand against them, back he would go into that wild-beast pen from which he had just escaped!

To get up and go away was to give up, to acknowledge defeat, to leave the strange family in possession; and Jurgis might have sat shivering in the rain for hours before he could do that, had it not been for the thought of his family. It might be that he had worse things yet to learn⁠—and so he got to his feet and started away, walking on, wearily, half-dazed.