Where should she find compassion, if not at this door? If she had been a murderess, she would still have knocked on it, knowing that they would forgive her. If she had sunk to being the most miserable of creatures, come wasted and in rags, she would still confidently have gone up to that door, and expected a loving welcome. That door was the entrance to her home; behind it she could only meet with love.
Had not her father tried her enough? Would they not soon open to her?
“Father, father!” she called. “Let me come in! I freeze, I tremble. It is terrible out here!”
“Mother, mother! You who have gone so many steps to serve me, you who have watched so many nights over me, why do you sleep now? Mother, mother, wake just this one night, and I will never give you pain again!”
She calls, and falls into breathless silence to listen for an answer. But no one heard her, no one obeyed her, no one answered.
Then she wrings her hands in despair, but there are no tears in her eyes.
The long, dark house with its closed doors and darkened windows lay awful and motionless in the night. What would become of her, who was homeless? Branded and dishonored was she, as long as she encumbered the earth. And her father himself pressed the red-hot iron deeper into her shoulders.
“Father,” she called once more, “what will become of me? People will believe the worst of me.”
She wept and suffered; her body was stiff with cold.