She tried to rush past her stepmother, but there was light enough from the dim lantern by the door to keep the woman from being taken unawares.
"No, you don't go back," she shrieked, "not a step do you go back. Out you go, I say, out! out! out!"
She seized the girl with her hands, clawing her face, tearing her hair. She was as mad as Nancy and stronger, and she had her sister-in-law to help her. The latter had grabbed Nancy's arms and was pulling them back till the pain shot like tongues of flame through her tortured body. Inch by inch they strained toward the door, fighting with teeth and nails and feet, their breath, too spent for words, coming and going in convulsive gasps.
Nancy writhed and twisted to get out of the grasp of her tormentors, insensible to more pain, the need to get back to the side of her dead friend possessing her like a legion of devils. But the women were more than she could stand against. Slowly they dragged her across the floor; she contested every inch, but they beat down her strength, they pommeled her and bruised her and tore her clothes into long rags, they struck her across the head till she was almost senseless. Desperately she struggled, but uselessly, for the stepmother grasped her throat with sinewy hands and, pressing tighter and tighter, stifled her till her eyes were ready to leap from their sockets and her lungs choked vainly for air. Then they opened the great gate, swinging it wide on its creaking axles, and flung the girl, like a heap of discarded rubbish, into the street.
She was not dead. The cold air forced itself at the price of agony down her throat. The blood began moving again. But her mind had still one single insane thought, to get back to the deathbed, so as soon as she was able to pull herself up she plunged against the barred door, throwing herself again and again upon its unyielding boards, crying, as she thought, with a voice which could be heard for miles, but which actually was only the hoarse rattle of a whisper. She did not think of Ronald or of anything else. She forgot the iron cold clamping its grip on her veins, chains of steely frost from which no prisoner, once bound, could escape. She wanted to get back to her mistress, back to her mistress or to die. And what the women had begun she was in a fair way to complete when a sudden spell of weariness halted her, a spell of deep warm peace. She felt the hand of the old t'ai-t'ai on her shoulder.
"Do you care?" she heard her voice saying. "Ah, my child, my child, why do you care?"
It was all right now. She could sleep and be comforted.