"Why?" they all cry in chorus.
"Because she murdered her child."
Anna Liisa says nothing for a time, but finally she falls on her knees before her father and implores his pardon. Then she confesses that everything the woman has said is true, even the accusation that she murdered her own child.
Her father snatches up a hatchet and tries to kill her, in which attempt he would have succeeded had not Mikko interfered and dragged her away.
When the third act opens the father, mother, and fiancé are found discussing the situation, and finally deciding to let their friends come to the congratulatory festival on first reading of the banns, and pretend that nothing unusual had happened. Afterwards they could rearrange the relationship.
The mother, who had been watching Anna Liisa, is afraid of her curious apathetic behaviour, and looks out of the window, when she sees her setting off in a boat, apparently with the purpose of self-destruction. She and the fiancé rush off to save her and bring her home. The girl explains in wild despair how she thought she saw her child under the water, and intended to jump in and rescue him. She raves somewhat like Ophelia in Hamlet, but her former lover Mikko comes back to her, and whispers in her ear. She rejects him violently.
"Let me get away from here," she murmurs to her mother, "let me get away," and a very sad and touching scene ensues.
The little sister bounds in straight from church, and says how lovely it was to hear the banns read, and to think the wedding was so near. She decorates the room with wreaths of pine branches, and festoons of the birch-tree, such festoons as we make into trails with holly and ivy for Christmas decorations. She jumps for joy as the guests begin to arrive, and in this strange play the father actually thinks it right for his daughter to marry Mikko, her seducer, whom he welcomes, and they arrange affairs comfortably between them.
This is very remarkable. In most countries it would be considered right for the father to expel his daughter's lover from his house; but in this play of Minna Canth's she draws a very Finnish characteristic.
"Se oli niin sallittu" ("It is so ordained") is a sort of motto amongst this Northern people. Whether it is that they are phlegmatic, wanting in energy, fatalists, or what, one cannot say, but certain it is that they sit down and accept the inevitable as calmly as the Mohammedan does when he remarks: "It is the will of Allah."