“You have no right to connect my name with any gentleman’s. You can’t have any right merely because I go to Mr Stumfold’s church. It’s quite preposterous. If I went to Mr Paul’s church”—Mr Paul was a very High Church young clergyman who had wished to have candles in his church, and of whom it was asserted that he did keep a pair of candles on an inverted box in a closet inside his bedroom—“if I went to Mr Paul’s church, might his wife, if he had one, come and ask me all manner of questions like that?”

Now Mr Paul’s name stank in the nostrils of Mrs Stumfold. He was to her the thing accursed. Had Miss Mackenzie quoted the Pope, or Cardinal Wiseman or even Dr Newman, it would not have been so bad. Mrs Stumfold had once met Mr Paul, and called him to his face the most abject of all the slaves of the scarlet woman. To this courtesy Mr Paul, being a good-humoured and somewhat sportive young man, had replied that she was another. Mrs Stumfold had interpreted the gentleman’s meaning wrongly, and had ever since gnashed with her teeth and fired great guns with her eyes whenever Mr Paul was named within her hearing. “Ribald ruffian,” she had once said of him; “but that he thinks his priestly rags protect him, he would not have dared to insult me.” It was said that she had complained to Stumfold; but Mr Stumfold’s sacerdotal clothing, whether ragged or whole, prevented him also from interfering, and nothing further of a personal nature had occurred between the opponents.

But Miss Mackenzie, who certainly was a Stumfoldian by her own choice, should not have used the name. She probably did not know the whole truth as to that passage of arms between Mr Paul and Mrs Stumfold, but she did know that no name in Littlebath was so odious to the lady as that of the rival clergyman.

“Very well, Miss Mackenzie,” said she, speaking loudly in her wrath; “then let me tell you that you will come by your ruin,—yes, by your ruin. You poor unfortunate woman, you are unfit to guide your own steps, and will not take counsel from those who are able to put you in the right way!”

“How shall I be ruined?” said Miss Mackenzie, jumping up from her seat.

“How? Yes. Now you want to know. After having insulted me in return for my kindness in coming to you, you ask me questions. If I tell you how, no doubt you will insult me again.”

“I haven’t insulted you, Mrs Stumfold. And if you don’t like to tell me, you needn’t. I’m sure I did not want you to come to me and talk in this way.”

“Want me! Who ever does want to be reproved for their own folly? I suppose what you want is to go on and marry that man, who may have two or three other wives for what you know, and put yourself and your money into the hands of a person whom you never saw in your life above a few months ago, and of whose former life you literally know nothing. Tell the truth, Miss Mackenzie, isn’t that what you desire to do?”