re it ought to be.
I've puzzled out the meaning of it. That letter's in her husband's
possession."

Dahlia, with her ears stretching for all that might be uttered, heard
this. Passing round the door, she fronted her father.

"My letter gone to him!" she cried. "Shameful old man! Can you look on
me? Father, could you give it? I'm a dead woman."

She smote her bosom, stumbling backward upon Rhoda's arm.

"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 l