Then she departed, pulling the street-door violently and leaving it open. The household stood agape, as if the storm itself had torn into the home. Out of sheer stupefaction the persons forgot to close their mouths.
Out of the clouds poured a drenching rain mixed with hail. The tempest seethed like a cauldron.
This boiling tempest, however, raged in Chyene’s bosom. Something stormed furiously within her. She no longer felt the ground beneath her. The flood soaked her through and through, but this could not restrain her. It served only to augment her savage mood.
She ran from house to house, wherever she might have expected to come upon her daughter and the “apostate.” She stopped nowhere, uttered never a word, but dashed in and then sped out like a flash of lightning, leaving the household open-mouthed with astonishment.
She should find them! Even under the ground. And she did not cease her cursing and her maledictions.
As she rushed from the last house she paused for a moment. Whither now?
She turned homeward. Her heart told her that her daughter was now at home. Her lips muttered the most terrible imprecations, and the inner fury was at its height; the very air, it seemed to her, was laden with her cries, with her curses and oaths.
With a strong gust of wind, a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder, she tore into her home.
Her daughter was not there.
She sank upon a chair and burst into wailing.