Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/446

 it since the night of the riot. The Town demolished the place and even dug away the hill itself to make a site for the new railway station. When the wreckers attacked the stable they found a room whose walls were covered with pencil sketches. By the window stood a half-finished painting black with soot and dust. On the table there was a coffee-pot, several soiled plates, and a fragment of something which turned out to be bread. Nearby beneath a layer of soot lay a woman's handkerchief of fine linen marked with the initials M.C.; one of the workmen took it home to his wife. The other things—the sketches and the painting—were thrown into a heap and burned on the very spot where eight years before there had been another fire in the snow.

