Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/33

 rose in the morning wondering what new and devilish torture awaited me, and I lay quaking in my bed at night knowing that I would soon hear him kicking at my door. I think I was hardly myself during that time, but I endured all while it was I alone who had to suffer. But one night he raised his hand to my old mother, when she was trying to protect me from his brutality, and struck her down. That night I killed him."

For an instant Ruth Herrick's heart stopped beating, but she sat motionless, watching the woman opposite her. There was no change in her calm face. Mrs. Brandow raised her eyes to it for a moment and dropped them again.

"I killed him," she repeated dully. "I have said it over to myself a good many times in the awful days and nights I have spent in this place. I have even said it it aloud to hear how it would sound, but it did n't relieve me as it does now. And you—you look as if I were talking about an insect. I felt that way at first. It did n't seem to me that he was a human being, and I killed him as I would have killed a