“You conqueror, who have taken me out of myself,” she said, “I lay in fathomless misery and you have changed it to a paradise. My hands stuck fast to the iron latch of the closed door and were torn and wounded; on the threshold of my home my tears lie frozen to pearls of ice. Anger froze my heart when I heard the blows on my mother’s back. In the cold snow-drift I hoped to sleep away my anger, but you came. O Love, child of fire, to one who was frozen by much cold you came. When I compare my sufferings to the glory won by them, they seem to me as nothing. I am free of all ties. I have no father nor mother, no home. People will believe all evil of me and turn away from me. It has pleased you to do this, O Love, for why should I stand higher than my beloved? Hand in hand we will wander out into the world. Gösta Berling’s bride is penniless; he found her in a snow-drift. We shall not live in lofty halls, but in a cottage at the edge of the wood. I shall help him to watch the kiln, I shall help him to set snares for partridges and hares, I shall cook his food and mend his clothes. Oh, my beloved, how I shall long and mourn, while I sit there alone by the edge of the wood and wait for you! But not for the days of riches, only for you; only you shall I look for and miss,—your footstep on the forest path, your joyous song, as you come with your axe on your shoulder. Oh, my beloved, my beloved! As long as my life lasts, I could sit and wait for you.” So she lay and sang hymns to the heart-conquering god, and never once had closed her eyes in sleep when the major’s wife came in. When she had gone, Marianne got up and dressed herself. Once more must she put on the black velvet dress and the thin satin slippers. She wrapped a blanket about her like a shawl, and hurried out once again into the terrible night. Calm, starlit, and bitingly cold the February night lay over the earth; it was as if it would never end. And the darkness and the cold of that long night lasted on the earth long, long after the sun had risen, long after the snow-drifts through which Marianne wandered had been changed to water. Marianne hurried away from Ekeby to get help. She could not let those men who had rescued her from the snow-drift and opened their hearts and home to her be hunted away. She went down to Sjö to Major Samzelius. It would be an hour before she could be back. When the major’s wife had said farewell to her home, she went out into the yard, where her people were waiting, and the struggle began. She placed them round about the high, narrow house, the upper story of which was the pensioners’ far-famed home,—the great room with the whitewashed walls, the red-painted chests, and the great folding-table, where playing-cards swim in the spilled brandy, where the broad beds are hidden by yellow striped curtains where the pensioners sleep.