Like a she-wolf set upon in her den, at bay, and ready to tear anything she meets with to pieces, Yagna sprang up. Burning with the most furious hate, and frenzied to the uttermost extreme of rage, she lashed her adversary with stinging words, that came each of them from her lips like the strokes of a whip. “Indeed?—So ’twas I who pursued your man, was it? Yet there is none but knows how I always drove him from me! How, like a cur, he would whine outside my door, that he might have but the mere sight of a shoe of mine!—Yes, and he took hold of me by force, till I was bereft of sense, and let him do all his will, for my brains whirled.—And now will I tell you all the truth ... but you will rue the telling! He loved me—loved me more than tongue can tell! And you he shrank from, even to loathing; his gorge, poor man! rose at the thought of your love; ’twas in his throat, as rancid reasty fat, ancient and musty and unbearable; and at the memory of you, he would spit with sheer disgust! Nay, not to see you any more, he willingly would have done himself a harm.... You sought the truth; you have it now!—And, moreover, I will tell you—and do not forget it—if I should but say the word, when you would kiss his feet, he’d spurn you from him, and go following me throughout the world!—So weigh my words, and never dare to think yourself my equal.—Have you understood?” Towards the end, though loud and passionate in speech, she had become mistress of herself, fearless, and more beautiful than ever. Even her mother listened to her with astonishment, mingled with dread; for now another woman stood revealed before her, as terrible, as evil, and as dangerous as the dark cloud that bears the lightning within it. Her words pierced Hanka, wounded her almost to death. They struck her without mercy, crushed and trampled her down. She felt strengthless, mindless, almost as unconscious as a tree that falls struck by the thunderbolt. She was scarcely able to breathe; her lips grew very white, and she sank back on a bench. Her anguish, it seemed to her, was rending her to pieces—nay, crushing her to grains of barren sand: even the tears had vanished from her face, grown ashy with the throes of that fierce ordeal, though her bosom still was shaken with deep dry sobs. She stared out into space as if in terror—into the abyss which had opened suddenly before her eyes; and she trembled as trembles an ear of corn, that the wind whirls on to destruction. Yagna had long ago gone with her mother to the other side of the house; Yuzka was with the ducklings at the mill-pond; but Hanka still sat motionless in the same place, like a bird bereft of her fledgelings, unable to scream out, to defend itself, to flee anywhither, only now and then stirring its wings, and uttering a mournful cry.