Mothers of Men by William Henry Warner — Read

When there has been a shade or promise of evil hanging over our lives, when we have waked each morning with the dread of what the day may bring, and go to bed at night to toss and turn in fear of the morrow, and then, suddenly, we find that the thing we feared has happened, instead of the appalling terror and the horror of its consequences that we anticipated, very often there is a sense of infinite relief, that now no worse can come, for the worst has happened.

So it was with Marie. With the closing and locking of the door on the dead body of Von Pfaffen, a great, numb calmness enveloped her. He was dead. She had killed him. Nothing mattered. There was nothing to matter. The world, for her, was finished. She wondered in a curious subconscious way why she did not care. She had taken a human life, yet she felt no remorse, no fear. All emotion was dead in her heart. She only knew that she was tired, terribly tired. Her knees seemed to give way under her. She stumbled, dragged herself with the help of her icy hands, hanging onto the chairs, groping along the edge of the table. She only knew she must reach the couch, which seemed so far away, where she could rest. Her mouth was dry, her tongue felt swollen. It was an effort to close or raise the heavy lids over her burning eyes. A dreadful sense of dizzy nausea struck her. Suffocating waves of blackness seemed to beat up from her heart and surge across her vision.