"You must give me the right to settle this affair with him," said her visitor. "We cannot risk such statements being made to people of the village, to such a man as Poussette, for example."
"Oh—Poussette!" Miss Clairville found it possible and even pleasant now to laugh. "Do you not know then all about Mr. Poussette? He is in love with me, too, or so he says. Yes, I have had a great deal of bother with him. That poor Mme. Poussette! It is not enough that one is faded and worn and has lost one's only little child, but one must also be wished dead, out of the way by one's husband. Ah—you are startled, mais c'est la belle verité! It is a good thing to be a clergyman, like you, Mr. Ringfield; you are removed from all these bétises, all these foolish imaginings. You do your work and look neither to the right nor the left. How I wish I were like you! I only pray, for I do pray sometimes, that no thought of me will ever darken your young and ardent life; I only hope that no care for me will ever turn you aside from your plain duty."
"Do not, please," broke in Ringfield, pushing back his chair so loudly that she was obliged to beg more caution, "use that tone to me. Twenty-six is not so very young. I should have spoken and felt as I feel and as I speak when I was twenty. So Poussette is added to your list of admirers! Will it be Father Rielle himself next, I wonder? Oh, Miss Clairville—I was right! The theatre is no place for you. I ask you to leave it, to forsake it for ever. This your opportunity. Do not go back to it. I do not, it is true, know anything about it from actual experience, but I can gather that it presents, must present, exceptional temptations. Will you not be guided by me? Will you not take and act upon my advice?"
"But the special troubles that beset me are here, not within the theatre! If Poussette is silly, with his ridiculous attentions when he thinks his wife is not looking, if the other person, if——"
"You mean this man Crabbe?"
She inclined her head; at the mention of the name all spirit seemed to die out of her.
"If he maligns me, slanders and lies about me, that is here—here at St. Ignace, and not at the theatre. Why, then, do you expect me to return here for good? I come back too often as it is. I should leave here altogether, but that some influence, some fate, always draws me back."
"Whose influence? for with fate I will have nothing to do. God and a man's self—with these we front the world, the flesh, and the Devil. Crabbe's evil influence still! You knew him when he called himself by another name?"
"Yes, Mr. Edmund Hawtree. We, we—— I suppose you would call it a flirtation. He was very different then, as you may believe."
Jealousy leapt into Ringfield's breast, the first he had ever known, and a common retort sprang to his lips.