Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/217

 "Let me go. . . . You . . . You are no better than the others . . . a common beast, a swine like the others . . . a swine like all men, lying to me all these years. And on a night like this. May God damn you both in Hell forever and ever!"

She freed herself and sank to the floor at Krylenko's feet. The tirade gave way to a torrent of wild hysterical sobbing. Her pale, battered face was all distorted, her thin hair disarrayed. She collapsed suddenly into a barren shattered old woman, abandoned by life. She had lost in her battle against something which was far stronger than herself, stronger even than Lily and Krylenko. She was broken, pitiful.

Lily sat by helplessly, her own tears dried now. She turned the rings round and round on her fingers and in the gesture there was a concentrated agony.

"You must not mind her," she said presently. "She is not well." Then she rose slowly and moved toward her sister. "Irene," she said softly. "Irene."

But Irene shuddered and drew away from her. "Don't touch me . . . evil one! Don't touch me!" she cried monotonously.

"Perhaps if she had rest," said Krylenko. "Perhaps if she slept."

Irene kept up moaning and rocking. "In the Flats they're dying. . . . In the Flats they're dying . . . and you two up here, like beasts all that time . . . like beasts!"

Lily began to walk up and down the long shadowy room in a wild distracted manner, as if the contagion of her sister's hysteria had touched her too. "There is nothing I can do," she kept saying. "There is nothing. . . . Perhaps if we left her . . ."

It was Krylenko who solved the difficulty. He bent over Irene and picked her up despite her protests. She screamed. She wept. She would have scratched and bitten him if his arms had been less powerful and his grip less certain. He turned to Lily. "Where is her bed?"

He spoke with a curious, intimate understanding. In an hour he had come nearer to Lily than ten years had brought him to the chaste fanatic sister.

Silently Lily led the way up the long stairs while he followed