The great land-owner was impatient at being forced to wait for Marianne. He stamped in the snow with his great snow-boots and beat with his arms, for it was bitter cold.
“Perhaps you ought not to have played Marianne away to Gösta,” said Sintram.
“What do you mean?”
Sintram arranged his reins and lifted his whip, before he answered:—
“It did not belong to the tableau, that kissing.”
The powerful land-owner raised his arm for a death-blow, but Sintram was already gone. He drove away, whipping the horse to a wild gallop without daring to look back, for Melchior Sinclair had a heavy hand and short patience.
He went now into the dancing-room to look for his daughter, and saw how Gösta and Marianne were dancing.
Wild and giddy was that last polka.
Some of the couples were pale, others glowing red, dust lay like smoke over the hall, the wax-candles gleamed, burned down to the sockets, and in the midst of all the ghostly ruin, they flew on, Gösta and Marianne, royal in their tireless strength, no blemish on their beauty, happy in the glorious motion.