Читать книгу Nameless River онлайн

23 страница из 59

She did not look toward the openings, but stared at the wall before her with its rows of shelves behind their screened doors where her mother kept her scoured pans.

And then, suddenly, there came a thin, keen whine, a little clear whistle, and a knife stood quivering between her dropped hands, its point imbedded deep in the leaves of the old Bible.

For a moment she sat so, while a flush of anger poured up along her throat to flare to the roots of her banded hair.

With no uncertain hand she jerked the blade from the profound pages, leapt to her feet, snatched a stub of pencil from a broken mug on a shelf, tore a fly-leaf from the precious Book, and, bending in the light, wrote something on it. She folded the bit of paper, thrust the knife point through it and, turning swiftly, flung them viciously through the window where the thin curtain had been parted.

She stood so, facing the window defiantly, scorning to blow out the light.

Then she dropped her eyes to the desecrated Word and they were flaming—and this is what she had written on the fly-leaf: