Suddenly she felt wings given her. Out of the brown shadows, across the shaft of light which illuminated the bent, blond head of her brother with a symbolism marked by the congregation, she fled. The sunlight, the green grass, the trees, now waving in a gentle breeze, and most wonderful of all, the unlimited blue sky, seemed to hold out welcoming arms. She began to cry and to run as she cried. She feared that she might be pursued. Though she was not afraid to drive Matthew's young horse, she did not think of taking him, but sped on foot up Mount Zion toward the bounds of the enclosure, across the site of a more ancient church to the hill-top. There she usually looked down through a thick bit of virgin woods toward the smoothly flowing Cocalico, and beyond to pleasant Ephrata. But now she opened the rude fastening of an old gate, and ran across a field past a tall monument, toward a pair of arms of whose welcome she was certain. There was peace, and not in the dim cavern from which she fled!
CHAPTER III
TWO VERSIONS OF THE SAME STORY
After Ellen had beaten her way with gasps for breath up the slope beyond the meeting-house, she slackened her pace. She began to doubt pursuit, and besides she could now trust to her power of swift locomotion. For a while she kept inside the fences on the grass borders from which a dash into the wheat would have been easy, but after she had gone half a mile she wormed her plump body between two spreading rails and took to the road.
The sense of escape from prison was not new; many times when church was over she had looked up and round at the arching sky and the waving trees and had danced her way out to Matthew's buggy, and sometimes, from behind the safe shelter of its curtain, she had made atrocious faces at the back of Millie König's sleek head.
Presently, her joy at having escaped was tempered. She did not like to have the brethren consider her wicked. But penitence weakened and finally faded entirely away, its departure hastened by reflections of a nature common to mankind. Millie had copied her sentences in school—it did not make much difference what Millie thought of her. Brother Herman was notorious for his keenness in trade and he had cheated her father when he sold him a horse. As for Grandfather—she was sorry to hurt his feelings, but Grandfather was old. It is very easy to be good, Ellen believed, when you are old.
Suddenly the full import of the morning's events was clear to her. She was free, but Matthew was in prison! As she walked on she began to cry again. Perhaps he would let his beard grow until he looked like Grandfather and Amos and like the pictures of Father Friedsam and Brother Jabez and all the worthies of the past. He would not belong to her; he would belong to all those grim and pious people. Most dreadful of all, he would belong to Millie. At this, she stopped short in the road, remembering Millie's possessing eyes.
Again she began to run, dashing through the little hollow made by the creek, where the odors of fresh earth and the intense sweetness of elder blossoms would at any other moment have made her loiter. The creek bounded her father's farm and, taking a short cut, she left the road and crossed a meadow and then ran along the edge of a field of corn until she came to a gate which let her into the yard.