"You don't expect me to answer that?"

"You've not been in it a fortnight, and you have done more harm than most people in a lifetime."

"I'm afraid you exaggerate."

"You have taught it to drink."

"I gave a dying old woman what she most longed for."

"You've taught it to break the Sabbath."

"I made a great many little children very happy."

"You have ruined the habits of thrift we have been at such pains to teach and encourage for twenty-five years."

"I helped the poor when they asked me to."

"And now what I want to know is, what has become of the Hanc.o.c.k girl?"

"Pray who, exactly, is the Hanc.o.c.k girl?"

"That unfortunate creature who worked here for you on Wednesday."

Priscilla's face changed. "Emma?" she asked.

"Emma. At this hour the day before yesterday she was as good a girl as any in the village. She was good, and dutiful, and honest. Now what is she and where is she?"

"Has she--isn't she in her home?"

"She never went home."

"Then she did lose the money?"

"Lose it? She has stolen it. Do you not see you have deliberately made a thief out of an honest girl?"

Priscilla gazed in dismay at the avenging vicar's wife. It was true then, and she had the fatal gift of spoiling all she touched.

"And worse than that--you have brought a good girl to ruin. He'll never marry her now."

"He?"

"Do you not know the person she was engaged to has gone with her?"

"I don't know anything."

"They walked from here to Ullerton and went to London. Her father came round to us yesterday after your uncle had been to him making inquiries, and it is all as clear as day. Till your uncle told him, he did not know about the money, and had been too--not well enough that day to notice Emma's not having come home. Your uncle's visit sobered him. We telegraphed to the police. They've been traced to London.

That's all. Except," and she glared at Priscilla with all the wrath of a prophet whose denunciations have been justified, "except that one more life is ruined."

"I'm very sorry--very, very sorry," said Priscilla, so earnestly, so abjectly even, that her eyes filled with tears. "I see now how thoughtless it was of me."

"Thoughtless!"

"It was inexcusably thoughtless."

"Thoughtless!" cried Mrs. Morrison again.

"If you like, it was criminally thoughtless."

"Thoughtless!" cried Mrs. Morrison a third time.

"But it wasn't more than thoughtless. I'd give anything to be able to set it right. I am most truly grieved. But isn't it a little hard to make me responsible?"

Mrs. Morrison stared at her as one who eyes some strange new monster.

"How amazingly selfish you are," she said at last, in tones almost of awe.

"Selfish?" faltered Priscilla, who began to wonder what she was not.

"In the face of such total ruin, such utter shipwreck, to be thinking of what is hard on you. You! Why, here you are with a safe skin, free from the bitter anxieties and temptations poor people have to fight with, with so much time unoccupied that you fill it up with mischief, with more money than you know what to do with"--Priscilla pressed her hands together--"sheltered, free from every care"--Priscilla opened her lips but shut them again--"and there is that miserable Emma, hopeless, branded, for ever an outcast because of you,--only because of you, and you think of yourself and talk of its being hard."

Priscilla looked at Mrs. Morrison, opened her mouth to say something, shut it, opened it again, and remarked very lamely that the heart alone knows its own bitterness.

"Psha," said Mrs. Morrison, greatly incensed at having the Scriptures, her own speciality, quoted at her. "I'd like to know what bitterness yours has known, unless it's the bitterness of a bad conscience. Now I've come here to-day"--she raised her voice to a note of warning--"to give you a chance. To make you think, by pointing out the path you are treading. You are young, and it is my duty to let no young person go downhill without one warning word. You have brought much evil on our village--why you, a stranger, should be bent on making us all unhappy I can't imagine. You hypocritically try to pretend that what plain people call evil is really good. But your last action, forcing Emma Hanc.o.c.k to be a thief and worse, even you cannot possibly defend.

You have much on your conscience--far, far more than I should care to have on mine. How wicked to give all that money to Mrs. Jones. Don't you see you are tempting people who know she is defenceless to steal it from her? Perhaps even murder her? I saved her from that--you did not reckon with me, you see. Take my advice--leave Symford, and go back to where you came from"--Priscilla started--"and get something to do that will keep you fully occupied. If you don't, you'll be laying up a wretched, perhaps a degraded future for yourself. Don't suppose,"--her voice grew very loud--"don't suppose we are fools here and are not all of us aware of the way you have tried to lure young men on"--Priscilla started again--"in the hope, of course, of getting one of them to marry you. But your intentions have been frustrated luckily, in the one case by Providence flinging your victim on a bed of sickness and in the other by your having altogether mistaken the sort of young fellow you were dealing with."

Mrs. Morrison paused for breath. This last part of her speech had been made with an ever acc.u.mulating rage. Priscilla stood looking at her, her eyebrows drawn down very level over her eyes.

"My son is much too steady and conscientious, besides being too much accustomed to first-rate society, to stoop to anything so vulgar--"

"As myself?" inquired Priscilla.

"As a love-affair with the first stray girl he picks up."

"Do you mean me?"

"He saw through your intentions, laughed at them, and calmly returned to his studies at Cambridge."

"I boxed his ears."

"What?"

"I boxed his ears."

"You?"

"I boxed his ears. That's why he went. He didn't go calmly. It wasn't his studies."

"How dare you box--oh, this is too horrible--and you stand there and tell me so to my face?"