"No! You are cruel to me, and take from me the only joy I have!"
"Eli, Eli! Do not speak such dreadful words!" begged the mother.
"Yes, mother," she shrieked; "now I must say it! Yes, mother! You want me to marry that hateful man, and I will not. You shut me up here, where I am never happy, except when I am to go out! You take Mathilde from me, the only person I love and long for in the world! O God, what will become of me when Mathilde is no longer here—especially now that I have so much, so much I cannot manage when I have no one to talk with?"
"But you really have so seldom been with her lately," said Baard.
"What did that matter when I had her over at the window yonder!" answered the sick girl, and she cried in such a child-like way, that it seemed to Arne as though he had never before seen anything like it.
"But you could not see her there," said Baard.
"I could see the gard," answered she; and the mother added, hotly,—
"You do not understand such things at all."
Then Baard said no more.
"Now I can never go to the window!" said Eli. "I went there in the morning when I got up; in the evening I sat there in the moonlight: and I went there when I had no one else to go to. Mathilde, Mathilde!"