Melchior Sinclair watched them for a while; but then he went and left Marianne to dance. He slammed the door, tramped down the stairs, and placed himself in the sledge, where his wife already waited, and drove home.
When Marianne stopped dancing and asked after her parents, they were gone.
When she was certain of this she showed no surprise. She dressed herself quietly and went out in the yard. The ladies in the dressing-room thought that she drove in her own sledge.
She hurried in her thin satin shoes along the road without telling any one of her distress.
In the darkness no one recognized her, as she went by the edge of the road; no one could think that this late wanderer, who was driven up into the high drifts by the passing sledges, was the beautiful Marianne.
When she could go in the middle of the road she began to run. She ran as long as she was able, then walked for a while, then ran again. A hideous, torturing fear drove her on.
From Ekeby to Björne it cannot be farther than at most two miles. Marianne was soon at home, but she thought almost that she had come the wrong way. When she reached the house all the doors were closed, all the lights out; she wondered if her parents had not come home.
She went forward and twice knocked loudly on the front door. She seized the door-handle and shook it till the noise resounded through the whole house. No one came and opened, but when she let the iron go, which she had grasped with her bare hands, the fast-frozen skin was torn from them.
Melchior Sinclair had driven home in order to shut his door on his only child.
He was drunk with much drinking, wild with rage. He hated his daughter, because she liked Gösta Berling. He had shut the servants into the kitchen, and his wife in the bedroom. With solemn oaths he told them that the one who let Marianne in, he would beat to a jelly. And they knew that he would keep his word.