Miss Frost abducts and assaults Sunday Small, but the attack ends when police constables arrive with Tom Branning and free her. The confrontation is also a disclosure: Miss Frost claims responsibility for the deaths of Albert Pinnegar and Daisy Branning, turning Sunday’s immediate struggle to survive into the moment when the crimes against her friends are revealed. As she faces the possibility of dying alone, Sunday recognizes that she loves Tom; his arrival makes that realization inseparable from her rescue.

Captivity and confrontation

Sunday has been left alone for an unknown stretch of time, restrained in one position and unable to tell how long she has been there. She is thirsty, frightened, and in pain. The place seems to her like a cellar, and the prospect that no one will find her grows as the minutes pass. A light appears above a steep staircase; only when the person carrying it reaches her does Sunday recognize her captor as Miss Frost, the former workhouse matron.

Miss Frost is no longer the prim figure Sunday remembers. Her disordered appearance and erratic behavior make the encounter immediately threatening. As she circles Sunday, she accuses her of trying to take Albert Pinnegar from her and blames her for the loss of her job. The grievance joins personal jealousy to institutional punishment: Miss Frost invokes the punishment room, a place associated with Sunday’s earlier suffering, and presents the cellar as a new version of it. She has a knife and says she intends to make Sunday suffer. Sunday struggles against her restraints, aware that she may never see Tom Branning again.

Confession and the crimes revealed

The threat becomes a confession. Miss Frost says she killed Albert the previous night by stabbing him in the heart. She claims that, although he had rejected her, she could not bring herself to prolong his death. Her account connects her fixation on Sunday to her anger at Albert, but it also establishes that Miss Frost has already killed him and is now threatening another victim.

Miss Frost also describes Daisy Branning’s death. She says she pushed Daisy, who was carrying a child, into the canal, and that Daisy fought to survive. The disclosure forces Sunday to confront the fate of her friend while she herself remains helpless and in danger. Sunday’s anger comes from imagining Daisy’s fear, but there is no possibility of helping her now; the immediate threat has shifted to Sunday. Miss Frost begins to refer to the animals at Biddy Spooner’s home as well, but her statement breaks off before she explains what happened there. The passage therefore adds this reference without resolving it.

As Miss Frost continues the attack, Sunday understands that the threat is not merely meant to frighten her into silence. In the face of the knife and her captor’s insistence that no one is there to protect her, Sunday’s thoughts turn to Tom and to the possibility of never telling him what she feels. Her recognition of love arrives at the point of greatest danger: it is not a promise of safety, but a new understanding of what she stands to lose.

The interruption and rescue

The attack is interrupted by noise and footsteps on the staircase. Miss Frost looks up and retreats as two police constables seize the knife and handcuff her. Their arrival changes the balance of the scene at once: the captive is no longer alone with her assailant, and Miss Frost is no longer free to carry out her threat. The constables’ intervention also gives immediate force to the admissions she has just made, though this scene does not describe any later inquiry or judgment.

Tom Branning drops beside Sunday and works at the ropes binding her. He is openly sobbing as he tries to free her, expressing how close he believes she came to being lost. Once released, Sunday is held against his chest as she struggles with dizziness. Lady Lavinia Huntley appears briefly over Tom’s shoulder. Sunday finds her voice and demands to be taken away from Miss Frost; then she faints in Tom’s arms. The rescue is therefore physical and immediate, but Sunday’s final response also shows that the danger has not simply vanished with Miss Frost’s arrest.

Significance within the plot

The event reverses the punishment Miss Frost had tried to impose. She casts Sunday’s confinement as deserved discipline, drawing on the authority she once exercised in the workhouse; the arrival of the constables instead makes Miss Frost the person restrained. Her accusation that Sunday cost her position is answered not through argument but through the exposure of her violence and the intervention of others.

The scene also gathers several strands of danger into one confrontation. Sunday’s earlier fear of Miss Frost becomes a direct threat to her life, while Miss Frost’s attachment to Albert is revealed as bound up with both his murder and her hostility toward Sunday. Daisy’s death is disclosed through the killer’s own account, making Sunday a witness to the truth even while she remains unable to act on it. Tom’s arrival then changes the event’s outcome: Sunday is freed, and the love she had only just recognized is met by his desperate effort to save her.