Hedvig has slept on it. She has not done what she agreed to do the previous evening. When Gregers sees her, he says he can tell. She explains that her courage did not simply fail at the decisive moment. Waking early and thinking again, she found the proposal strange. It had seemed beautiful at night. By morning she could no longer see what was in it.

The proposal was to sacrifice her beloved wild duck so that her father would believe in her love. This conversation comes in Act V of Ibsen's The Wild Duck. Hjalmar has left the house, and his daughter fears that he will never want her again. Gregers, his old friend, has sought to expose the family's deceptions and enable a new life. The person now expected to provide something precious for that renewal is the child who did not create those deceptions.

The previous evening, Hedvig scarcely understood what she had done wrong. Learning about Gina's past, Hjalmar has questioned whether he is the child's father and pushed her away. Gina wants him to look at his daughter. After he leaves, the child begs her mother to bring him back. Gregers would allow Hjalmar to complete his inward struggle alone. Gina is ready to go out: the child in front of them needs attention first.

Left with Gregers, Hedvig asks for an explanation. He puts it off until she is older, but her fear cannot be put off with it. She wonders whether Gina might have found her somewhere and taken her home. Perhaps that is what her father has discovered. Yet even if it were true, she reasons, he could still love her. The wild duck was a gift from elsewhere, and she loves it very much.

Her example grows from experience. A creature's arrival from outside has not cancelled the days of care that followed. She does not know how to establish her parentage. She knows that belonging can be made through attention. Gregers is being offered a child's account of attachment that already answers something the adults have made frightening.

She also tells him about praying for the duck. The practice began when her father was ill and she feared losing him. Later she added the bird, which had been weak when it arrived. The two concerns share an evening without competing. Giving the duck a place in her prayers has not taken her father out of them.

Gregers then asks whether she could freely sacrifice it for Hjalmar. She is startled and wants to know whether that would help. He urges her to try and asks about her courage. She agrees, thinking that her grandfather could assist. Before leaving, Gregers tells her not to confide in her mother, who would not understand them.

In this exchange, the bird changes roles. Hedvig has used it to show that attachment can survive an uncertain origin. Gregers makes losing it a way to authenticate another attachment. The more she values it, the stronger the proof. Her care is not dismissed; it is recruited to increase the worth of what she is asked to surrender.

The language of free choice cannot remove the fear already shaping her answer. Her first concern is whether the plan will bring her father back. She has not approached Gregers with a wish to give up the duck. An adult has offered a frightened child a method by which love might again become available, and made courage the condition of attempting it.

Secrecy narrows the conversation further. Gina has not understood everything either. But she has insisted that the child's immediate distress matters more urgently than the father's passage through an elevated emotional crisis. Now she is placed among those who cannot understand. One of the people most available to help Hedvig judge the plan is excluded from it.

And yet the child thinks again. Her morning hesitation is not a complete theory of what has gone wrong. It is a small interval in which a proposal heard under pressure loses its brilliance. She still wants her father. What has altered is her confidence that his love should have to be recovered in this particular way.

Gregers does not use the interval to reconsider his advice. He first suspects insufficient resolve, then treats her explanation as a sign of what growing up in this household has done to her. He invokes the things that make life valuable and the joy of brave sacrifice. He finishes by assuring her that he still believes in her.

Such confidence can sound generous while allowing only one acceptable answer. He believes she can carry out the plan; he does not extend the same confidence to her possibility of finding a reason against it. If she agrees, she is brave. If she doubts, something is lacking in her. The advice remains secure while the child's character becomes the subject of examination.

When Hjalmar returns, Hedvig runs towards him and is rejected again. Later he hesitates over his own departure. Tiredness, the weather, and practical difficulties make leaving immediately burdensome. He asks for breathing space, perhaps a day or two. His need for time is intelligible. The contrast lies in how little room Gregers has allowed the child for a morning's second thought.

The later catastrophe occurs in the loft. When a shot is heard, the adults do not yet know what has happened. Gregers supplies an interpretation: Hedvig has sacrificed the duck. Hjalmar is moved and begins looking for his daughter, ready to call her back to him. For a moment, Gregers thinks his account of the family's renewal has been confirmed.

This misreading is devastating in its own right. The father's tenderness seems to become available through a story about what the daughter has surrendered. The report has not been checked, and the child has not spoken. What she has supposedly proved reaches the adults before the urgent question of where she is and how she is faring.

They find her fatally injured. Relling confirms her death. Gina wants her taken into her own little room, away from being looked at by others, and the parents carry her there. The movement is practical and tender. While the adults' interpretations have repeatedly made Hedvig serve a larger purpose, her mother still has a particular child to look after.

After the parents leave, Gregers tries to find in Hjalmar's grief a reason that her death will not have been in vain. Relling challenges his expectation of lasting change. Neither man's prediction is a future the play has shown. Their disagreement again places the child beside the question of what her father will become.

If Hjalmar changes, her death does not become a worthwhile education. If he fails to change, her love does not become wasted. The question of his future cannot establish why she should have had to pay for it. Nor need we reduce the tragedy to one sentence of advice, or turn it into a defence of every family secret, to recognise the pressure Gregers adds.

Before the catastrophe, Hedvig has already made another possibility audible. Something that seemed beautiful yesterday seems wrong today. She still loves her father and still cares for the duck. Those attachments once fitted together in an evening prayer. A child should not have to destroy one before an adult will recognise the other.