Afterwards, when her mother and father tried to make her tell them why she ran away, she could not say; the answer was beyond her own power.

There was no snow on the ground, but the earth was frozen in great ribs after a late thaw.  Ellen ran painfully between the ridges which a long line of ice-wagons had made with their heavy wheels earlier in the day.  When the spaces between the ridges were too narrow for her little feet, she ran along the crests, and that was precarious.  She fell once and bruised one of her delicate knees, then she fell again, and struck the knee on the same place.  It hurt her, and she caught her breath with a gasp of pain.  She pulled up her little frock and touched her hand to her knee, and felt it wet, then she whimpered on the lonely road, and, curiously enough, there was pity for her mother as well as for herself in her solitary grieving.  “Mother would feel pretty bad if she knew how I was hurt, enough to make it bleed,” she murmured, between her soft sobs.  Ellen did not dare cry loudly, from a certain unvoiced fear which she had of shocking the stillness of the night, and also from a delicate sense of personal dignity, and a dislike of violent manifestations of feeling which had strengthened with her growth in the midst of the turbulent atmosphere of her home.  Ellen had the softest childish voice, and she never screamed or shouted when excited.  Instead of catching the motion of the wind, she still lay before it, like some slender-stemmed flower.  If Ellen had made much outcry with the hurt in her heart and the smart of her knee, she might have been heard, for the locality was thickly settled, though not in the business portion of the little city.  The houses, set prosperously in the midst of shaven lawns—­for this was a thrifty and emulative place, and democracy held up its head confidently—­were built closely along the road, though that was lonely and deserted at that hour.  It was the hour between half-past six and half-past seven, when people were lingering at their supper-tables, and had not yet started upon their evening pursuits.  The lights shone for the most part from the rear windows of the houses, and there was a vague compound odor of tea and bread and beefsteak in the air.  Poor Ellen had not had her supper; the wrangle at home had dismissed it from everybody’s mind.  She felt more pitiful towards her mother and herself when she smelt the food and reflected upon that.  To think of her going away without any supper, all alone in the dark night!  There was no moon, and the solemn brilliancy of the stars made her think with a shiver of awe of the Old Testament and the possibility of the Day of Judgment.  Suppose it should come, and she all alone out in the night, in the midst of all those worlds and the great White Throne, without her mother?  Ellen’s grandmother, who was of a stanch orthodox breed, and was, moreover, anxious to counteract any possible detriment as to religious training from contact with the degenerate Louds of Loudville, had established a strict course of Bible study for her granddaughter at a very early age.  All celestial phenomena were in consequence transposed into a Biblical key for the child, and she regarded the heavens swarming with golden stars as a Hebrew child of a thousand years ago might have done.