for you,--and not because,--hear me, Crabbe, you are beyond
caring about. God forbid!--but because your form of vice must ever be
so distasteful to a woman. And then you are all wrong about your
surroundings. You are, you have been, at least, a man of education,
and yet you call this a hut and a hole. It is you who make it so! You
vilify, where you might ennoble. You defile where you should enrich
and keep pure. You are set here, in the midst of the most beautiful
scenes of Nature, scenes that cannot be matched anywhere in the world,
and yet you despise them and use them for your own undoing and that of
others. Nature lies at your door and you are answerable for your
treatment other."

Crabbe laughed surlily. "She's no business lying--where'd you say--at
my door. Nature, always Nature! Much good it's done me, Nature, and
all that rubbish. I hate it, I hate and abhor it, Ringfield. That's
what makes me drink. Too much Nature's been my ruin. I'd be sober
enough in a big town with lively streets and bustle and riot and row.
I wouldn't drink there. I'd show them the pace, I'd go it myself once
more and be d----d to all this rot and twaddle about Nature! Nature
doesn't care for me. So careful of the type she seems, but so careless
of the single life. She doesn't bother her head about me, or you, or
Henry Clairville or Pauline!"

He paused, and Ringfield shivered with sudden poignancy of
recollection. What right had this miserable scion of good family, so
fallen from grace, so shaken and so heartless, to call the lady of
Clairville Manor by her Christian name?

"Or Mme. Poussette!" said the minister hurriedly, but with meaning, as
he pronounced the name, his voice trembling in spite of himself.
"Nature, it is true, does not care for any of us. Nature will let you
starve, get drunk, go mad. Therefore, we need a greater than Nature.
Therefore, having this committed unto us we speak as----"

"O Mme. Poussette!" interrupted Crabbe, pouring the contents of the
tumbler down his throat. "Shall I get you some? No? Well, I don't
blame you, don't blame you. Mme. Poussette, poor creature! I have
heard she was pretty once. That was before I came, before--God's truth
this, Ringfield--before I taught her husband to drink deep."

"I might have known!" escaped from the other. "Our own people rarely
drink--like you."

"He was no innocent! He tippled, tippled. Then I came along and set
up my sign, Edmund C