"Go away!" she cried; "I don't like you; go away!"
"Oh, Eli, how can you say you don't like your own parents?" exclaimed the mother.
"No! you're unkind to me, and you take away every pleasure from me!"
"Eli, Eli! don't say such hard things," said the mother, imploringly.
"Yes, mother," she exclaimed; "now I must say it! Yes, mother; you wish to marry me to that bad man; and I won't have him! You shut me up here, where I'm never happy save when I'm going out! And you take away Mathilde from me; the only one in the world I love and long for! Oh, God, what will become of me, now Mathilde is gone!"
"But you haven't been much with her lately," Baard said.
"What did that matter, so long as I could look over to her from that window," the poor girl answered, weeping in a childlike way that Arne had never before seen in any one.
"Why, you couldn't see her there," said Baard.
"Still, I saw the house," she answered; and the mother added passionately, "You don't understand such things, you don't." Then Baard said nothing more.
"Now, I can never again go to the window," said Eli. "When I rose in the morning, I went there; in the evening I sat there in the moonlight: I went there when I could go to no one else. Mathilde! Mathilde?" She writhed in the bed, and went again into hysterics. Baard sat down on a stool a little way from the bed, and continued looking at her.