“You have been a wicked girl,” the ordinarily unmoved old man retorted.  “Your husband has come for you, and you go with him.  Know that, and let me hear no threats.  He’s a modest-minded, quiet young man, and a farmer like myself, and needn’t be better than he is.  Come you down to him at once.  I’ll tell you:  he comes to take you away, and his cart’s at the gate.  To the gate you go with him.  When next I see you—­you visiting me or I visiting you—­I shall see a respected creature, and not what you have been and want to be.  You have racked the household with fear and shame for years.  Now come, and carry out what you’ve begun in the contrary direction.  You’ve got my word o’ command, dead woman or live woman.  Rhoda, take one elbow of your sister.  Your aunt’s coming up to pack her box.  I say I’m determined, and no one stops me when I say that.  Come out, Dahlia, and let our parting be like between parent and child.  Here’s the dark falling, and your husband’s anxious to be away.  He has business, and ’ll hardly get you to the station for the last train to town.  Hark at him below!  He’s naturally astonished, he is, and you’re trying his temper, as you’d try any man’s.  He wants to be off.  Come, and when next we meet I shall see you a happy wife.”

He might as well have spoken to a corpse.

“Speak to her still, father,” said Rhoda, as she drew a chair upon which she leaned her sister’s body, and ran down full of the power of hate and loathing to confront Sedgett; but great as was that power within her, it was overmatched by his brutal resolution to take his wife away.  No argument, no irony, no appeals, can long withstand the iteration of a dogged phrase.  “I’ve come for my wife,” Sedgett said to all her instances.  His voice was waxing loud and insolent, and, as it sounded, Mrs. Sumfit moaned and flapped her apron.

“Then, how could you have married him?”

They heard the farmer’s roar of this unanswerable thing, aloft.

“Yes—­how! how!” cried Rhoda below, utterly forgetting the part she had played in the marriage.

“It’s too late to hate a man when you’ve married him, my girl.”

Sedgett went out to the foot of the stairs.

“Mr. Fleming—­she’s my wife.  I’ll teach her about hating and loving.  I’ll behave well to her, I swear.  I’m in the midst of enemies; but I say I do love my wife, and I’ve come for her, and have her I will.  Now, in two minutes’ time.  Mr. Fleming, my cart’s at the gate, and I’ve got business, and she’s my wife.”

The farmer called for Mrs. Sumfit to come up and pack Dahlia’s box, and the forlorn woman made her way to the bedroom.  All the house was silent.  Rhoda closed her sight, and she thought:  “Does God totally abandon us?”

She let her father hear:  “Father, you know that you are killing your child.”

“I hear ye, my lass,” said he.

“She will die, father.”

“I hear ye, I hear ye.”