She wrote in broken, or long, disconnected sentences, almost incoherently involved.  Sometimes there were gaps, sometimes the same word was twice or thrice repeated.  The whole resembled a letter written by a lunatic, yet every line, every stroke of the pen, expressed the same desire uttered with passionate longing:  “Take me away from here!  Take me away from this woman and this house!”

The epistle was addressed to her father.  She implored him to rescue her from this place, come or send for her.  “Her uncle, Matanesse Van Wibisma,” she said, “seemed to be a sluggish messenger; he had probably enjoyed the evenings at her aunt’s, which filled her, Henrica, with loathing.  She would go out into the world after her sister, if her father compelled her to stay here.”  Then she began a description of her aunt and her life.  The picture of the days and nights she had now spent for weeks with the old lady, presented in vivid characters a mixture of great and petty troubles, external and mental humiliations.

Only too often the same drinking and carousing had gone on below as to-day-Henrica had always been compelled to join her aunt’s guests, elderly dissolute men of French or Italian origin and easy morals.  While describing these conventicles, the blood crimsoned her flushed cheeks still more deeply, and the long strokes of the pen grew heavier and heavier.  What the abbe related and her aunt laughed at, what the Italian screamed and Monseigneur smilingly condemned with a slight shake of the head, was so shamelessly bold that she would have been defiled by repeating the words.  Was she a respectable girl or not?  She would rather hunger and thirst, than be present at such a banquet again.  If the dining-room was empty, other unprecedented demands were made upon Henrica, for then her aunt, who could not endure to be alone a moment, was sick and miserable, and she was obliged to nurse her.  That she gladly and readily served the suffering, she wrote, she had sufficiently proved by her attendance on the village children when they had the smallpox, but if her aunt could not sleep she was compelled to watch beside her, hold her hand, and listen until morning as she moaned, whined and prayed, sometimes cursing herself and sometimes the treacherous world.  She, Henrica, had come to the house strong and well, but so much disgust and anger, such constant struggling to control herself had robbed her of her health.

The young girl had written until midnight.  The letters became more and more irregular and indistinct, the lines more crooked, and with the last words:  “My head, my poor head!  You will see that I am losing my senses.  I beseech you, I beseech you, my dear, stern father, take me home.  I have again heard something about Anna—­” her eyes grew dim, her pen dropped from her hand, and she fell back in the chair unconscious.

There she lay, until the last laugh and sound of rattling glass had died away below, and her aunt’s guests had left the house.