MICHAEL: Ay! But, Father Peter, they say a good lawyer can break the law as often as he likes, and no one can say him nay. If a man knows the law he knows his duty.

PETER: True, Michael, if a man knows the law there is nothing illegal he cannot do when he likes: that is why folk become lawyers. That is about all they are good for; and there he stays, and has not written a line to us for four months now – a good son that, eh?

MICHAEL: Come, come, Father Peter, Dmitri’s letters must have gone astray – perhaps the new postman can’t read; he looks stupid enough, and Dmitri, why, he was the best fellow in the village. Do you remember how he shot the bear at the barn in the great winter?

PETER: Ay, it was a good shot; I never did a better myself.

MICHAEL: And as for dancing, he tired out three fiddlers Christmas come two years.

PETER: Ay, ay, he was a merry lad. It is the girl that has the seriousness – she goes about as solemn as a priest for days at a time.

MICHAEL: Vera is always thinking of others.

PETER: There is her mistake, boy. Let God and our little Father the Czar look to the world. It is none of my work to mend my neighbour’s thatch. Why, last winter old Michael was frozen to death in his sleigh in the snowstorm, and his wife and children starved afterwards when the hard times came; but what business was it of mine? I didn’t make the world. Let God and the Czar look to it. And then the blight came, and the black plague with it, and the priests couldn’t bury the people fast enough, and they lay dead on the roads – men and women both. But what business was it of mine? I didn’t make the world. Let God and the Czar look to it. Or two autumns ago, when the river overflowed on a sudden, and the children’s school was carried away and drowned every girl and boy in it. I didn’t make the world – let God or the Czar look to it.

MICHAEL: But, Father Peter –

PETER: No, no, boy; no man could live if he took his neighbour’s pack on his shoulder. (Enter VERA in peasant’s dress.) Well, my girl, you’ve been long enough away – where is the letter?

VERA: There is none to-day, Father.

PETER: I knew it.

VERA: But there will be one to-morrow, Father.

PETER: Curse him, for an ungrateful son.

VERA: O Father, don’t say that; he must be sick.

PETER: Ay! Sick of Profligacy, perhaps.

VERA: How dare you say that of him, Father? You know that is not true.