During the entire day following, she did not leave her home. She ate nothing and hardly thought at all, but lay in bed and gazed blankly at the ceiling, following with her eyes, the last fly that crept drowsily and half dead over it.
In the evening, Sowinska came in, sat down on a trunk and, without any introduction, said harshly: "The room is already rented to another tenant, so to-morrow you can clear out of here. And since you owe us fifteen rubles, I will keep all your duds and give them back to you only when you pay me the money."
"Very well," answered Janina and she looked at Sowinska indifferently, as though nothing out of the ordinary were at stake. "Very well, I shall go!" she added in a quieter tone and arose from the bed.
"You will doubtlessly manage to help yourself in some way, won't you? You will yet come to see me in a carriage, eh?" said Sowinska and an ugly, hostile light gleamed in her owlish eyes.
"Very well," repeated Janina in the same mechanical way and began to pace up and down the room.
Sowinska, growing tired of waiting for some kind of reply, left the room.
"So all is ended!" whispered Janina in a hollow voice and the thought of death became a conscious reality in her mind and shone alluringly.
"What is death? A forgetting, a forgetting!" she answered herself aloud, standing still and sinking her eyes in those murky deeps that opened up before her soul.
"Yes, a forgetting, a forgetting!" she repeated slowly and for a long time sat motionless, gazing at the flame of the lamp.
The night dragged on slowly, the house became quiet, the lights were gradually extinguished in the long rows of windows and an ever deeper silence spread itself about, until everything became steeped in this drowsy silence.