So he lay. The gray dawn came up and crept into the attic. The priest left, the women left, and he was alone with the still, white figure⁠—quieter now, but moaning and shuddering, wrestling with the grisly fiend. Now and then he would raise himself and stare at the white mask before him, then hide his eyes, because he could not bear it. Dead! dead! And she was only a girl, she was barely eighteen! Her life had hardly begun⁠—and here she lay murdered⁠—mangled, tortured to death!

It was morning when he rose up and came down into the kitchen⁠—haggard and ashen gray, reeling and dazed. More of the neighbors had come in, and they stared at him in silence as he sank down upon a chair by the table and buried his face in his arms.

A few minutes later the front door opened; a blast of cold and snow rushed in, and behind it little Kotrina, breathless from running, and blue with the cold. “I’m home again!” she exclaimed. “I could hardly⁠—”