ye of the disappointed and
unhappy lover. All Nature mocked him and it would go hard indeed with
him should religion, too, fail him in such a juncture, but the spirit
of work and priestly endeavour kept him as yet from sheer wretchedness;
he prayed daily to think less of the world and more of his calling and
it seemed as if the fate which brought him back to St. Ignace to love
and suffer in loving would spare him further, since there was no sign
of Miss Clairville's return. His preaching could not fail, because he
brought to it a fine original gift and an automatic precision and
certainty resulting from the excellent training of his Church, but
between Sundays the time dragged. His labours among the few scattered
and uneducated families of conflicting race and origin seemed
unconvincing and empty, and a new shyness possessed him; he disliked
hearing any mention of the Clairvilles, for Crabbe's story he had come
to accept as true without a word of questioning; indeed, Miss
Clairville's own words came back to him as a proof.

"Another patient of the soul," she had said. Also, she had referred to
something dark and of sinister import, fatal yet compelling, which
always drew her back from livelier and more congenial places, and, as
he judged, from a sphere of work which paid, to the house at Lac
Calvaire. That the society of her brother was the attraction,
Ringfield could not admit, and what other ties or friends had she? So
far as he could learn--none, and thus he read her story; growing up
unprotected and motherless, without any standard to judge by, she must
have accepted the attentions and fallen under the spell of a man who
probably appealed to her pity and also to her intellect. Crabbe had
been the only man in the neighbourhood capable of understanding her
cultivated allusions; the remnants of the mixed education she had drawn
from the school at Sorel and the pedantic dreary associations of the
manor house. But in the contemplation of such a thing as her marriage
to such a man Ringfield's fancy failed. The whole plan of creation was
altered and blackened. He did not wish to know on what terms Pauline
and this man now met. He tried to shut out all the images such a story
conveyed, and thus he asked no questions nor did he hear any gossip,
proving that the affair was old, and if once known to the country
people, accepted and forgotten. Why could he not treat it in the same
fashion? His faith was not shaken