The sense of escape from prison was not new; many times when church was over she had looked up and round at the arching sky and the waving trees and had danced her way out to Matthew's buggy, and sometimes, from behind the safe shelter of its curtain, she had made atrocious faces at the back of Millie König's sleek head.
Presently, her joy at having escaped was tempered. She did not like to have the brethren consider her wicked. But penitence weakened and finally faded entirely away, its departure hastened by reflections of a nature common to mankind. Millie had copied her sentences in school--it did not make much difference what Millie thought of her. Brother Herman was notorious for his keenness in trade and he had cheated her father when he sold him a horse. As for Grandfather--she was sorry to hurt his feelings, but Grandfather was old. It is very easy to be good, Ellen believed, when you are old.
Suddenly the full import of the morning's events was clear to her. She was free, but Matthew was in prison! As she walked on she began to cry again. Perhaps he would let his beard grow until he looked like Grandfather and Amos and like the pictures of Father Friedsam and Brother Jabez and all the worthies of the past. He would not belong to her; he would belong to all those grim and pious people. Most dreadful of all, he would belong to Millie. At this, she stopped short in the road, remembering Millie's possessing eyes.
Again she began to run, dashing through the little hollow made by the creek, where the odors of fresh earth and the intense sweetness of elder blossoms would at any other moment have made her loiter. The creek bounded her father's farm and, taking a short cut, she left the road and crossed a meadow and then ran along the edge of a field of corn until she came to a gate which let her into the yard.
The Levis house was one of the large, many-windowed brick houses common to the neighborhood. It was built solidly and its correctness of proportion gave it a comfortable beauty. The porch was not a part of the original structure, but had been added, as running water and other conveniences had been added within. Behind the house stood a large barn. The place had not the trim look of adjacent farms; there was a good deal of brush along the fences, the fences themselves needed rebuilding and the woodwork of the house needed paint. After looking carefully at the premises an observant person would have made up his mind that the owner was neither by taste nor by inclination a farmer.