“Mother, mother, shall I go to strangers when I have a home? Are you as hard as father? How can you allow me to be shut out? I will lay myself in the drift out here, if you do not let me in.”
Then Marianne’s mother laid her hand on the lock to open the door, but at the same moment a heavy step was heard on the stair, and a harsh voice called her.
Marianne listened: her mother hurried away, the harsh voice cursed her and then—
Marianne heard something terrible,—she could hear every sound in the silent house.
She heard the thud of a blow, a blow with a stick or a box on the ear; then she heard a faint noise, and then again a blow.
He struck her mother, the terrible brutal Melchior Sinclair struck his wife!
And in pale horror Marianne threw herself down on the threshold and writhed in anguish. Now she wept, and her tears froze to ice on the threshold of her home.
Grace! pity! Open, open, that she might bend her own back under the blows! Oh, that he could strike her mother, strike her, because she did not wish to see her daughter the next day lying dead in the snow-drift, because she had wished to comfort her child!
Great humiliation had come to Marianne that night. She had fancied herself a queen, and she lay there little better than a whipped slave.