For a long time she cried and sobbed on the mattress without moving. When she opened her eyes she could distinguish nothing in the room, the darkness was like a thick black veil covering everything. There were voices, but they seemed distant; the house seemed still, with the stillness that brings terror with it.
Suddenly the dark seemed full of big hands with hooked fingers stretching out to clutch at her.
She ran wildly to the door and shook it, screaming aloud.
“Oh, my mother! My mother! Manitsa![26] Where are you?”
VIII
In the meanwhile, her mistress, downstairs, was urging her husband to go to the police station.
“Just think of the little thief,” she was saying. “And I who kept her out of charity, though she broke a fortune in plates, because I thought that at least she had ‘clean hands.’ ”
“I wonder,” said an elderly man who had not yet spoken, and who was Taki’s godfather, “where the girl can have found this twenty-five drachmæ note?”
“I put it myself on my chest of drawers under my pincushion this morning,” explained Mattina’s mistress. “When I came to go out with the children it was missing; and she, the little hypocrite, helped me to look for it everywhere.”