“If ’tis God’s business to put down treachery, He’m a thought behind His work—to say it respectful. My experience is that the ungodly do very well ’pon Dartymoor. Be your sister going to bide with you?”
“Yes; she’m stopping. Her wouldn’t go in the almshouse when the wedding fell through. But it won’t be for long. I’m getting ripe an’ ready for the grave myself now.”
“The women of this generation ban’t no better than reptile toads. But your young chap will find a good wife come presently, please God. There’s a tidy maid here an’ there yet.”
“Not him. He’ll bide a bachelor for evermore. He’m so bitter as gall to the roots of his being since she wrote that letter. It have turned him away from the Almighty’s Self.”
“Chucked him over with a letter, did her?”
“Ess—an’ a very nice fashion of penmanship. Yet all written wi’ needles, so to say, as stabbed the poor young youth cruel. He gasped when he read it, as if he’d swallowed his meat wrong way. Then he handed it to me. She just said as she’d been wickedly deceived in him, and that she’d rather have trusted the sun not to shine than believe he could have acted so bad to her. An’ she also hoped the Lord would forgive him for treating a poor maiden so crooked.”
“That weern’t enough for Jonas Lethbridge, was it?”
“No, by Gor! He went straight to her, an’ there was fiery words; but the truth, or what she thought was truth, he never knowed. Her love had turned to hate in a single night. He pressed for reasons; and she said that to ax for reasons was the worst insult of all, seeing she knowed the whole secret truth about him. Not a word more could he get, though he tried, and was patient as Job for an hour of talk. Then, having his spark o’ passion like any other man, he called her a wanton, wicked jilt an’ left her. An’ no girl ever deserved hard names more than she.”
“’Tis a dark story, to be sure. That’s why us never heard the third axing of the banns, then?”
“It happened last spring, afore the last axing. Then, come winter, Dinah Hannaford’s mother died, an’ next thing us heard was that she’d got on wi’ Amos Thorn again.”