Her little body shook from
head to foot with the violence of her sobbing. She ground her small
teeth together and beat her head upon the floor with all her strength.
Her hair was uncoiled and hanging a tangled, dishevelled mass far below
her waist; her dress was torn; a spot of blood was upon her forehead;
her eyes were swollen; her cheeks flamed vermilion from the fever that
raged in her veins. Old Miss Baker found her thus towards five o'clock
the next morning.
What had happened between one o'clock and dawn of that fearful night
Trina never remembered. She could only recall herself, as in a picture,
kneeling before her broken and rifled trunk, and then--weeks later, so
it seemed to her--she woke to find herself in her own bed with an iced
bandage about her forehead and the little old dressmaker at her side,
stroking her hot, dry palm.
The facts of the matter were that the German woman who lived below
had been awakened some hours after midnight by the sounds of Trina's
weeping. She had come upstairs and into the room to find Trina stretched
face downward upon the floor, half-conscious and sobbing, in the throes
of an hysteria for which there was no relief. The woman, terrified, had
called her husband, and between them they had got Trina upon the bed.
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