“It is my pew, and I will do in it what I please. Look here, Mr. Wingfold—I don’t want to lose my temper with you, but I tell you that pew is mine as much as the chair you’re not ashamed to sit upon at this moment. And when he’s treated me as he has, I don’t see that God Almighty can complain of the manners of a woman like me!”

“Well, thinking of him as you do, I don’t wonder that you are rude.”

“What! You agree with me! That takes pluck!”

“I fear you mistake me.”

“Of course I do. I might have known! The moment it sounds like a parson is speaking like a man, you may be sure you mistake him!”

“You wouldn’t behave to a friend of your own according to what another person thought of him, would you?”

“No, by Jove, I wouldn’t!”

“Then you won’t expect me to do so.”

“I should think not. Of course you stick by the church!”

“The church is not my mistress, though I am her servant. God is my master, and I tell you he is as good and fair as goodness and fairness can be.”

“Ha! If he had treated you as he has treated me—then we would hear another tune! You call it good—you call it fair, to take from a poor creature he made himself the only thing she cared for?”

“And the cause of a strife that made the family in which he wanted to live a very hell on earth!”

“How dare you!” she cried, starting to her feet.

Wingfold did not move.

“Mrs. Wylder,” he said, “if you dare tell God that he is a devil, I may well dare tell you that you know nothing about him, and that I do.”

“Say on your honour, then, that if he had treated you as he has done me—taken from you the light of your eyes, would you count it fair? Speak like the man you are.”

“I know I would.”

“I don’t believe you! And I won’t worship him.”

“Who wants you to worship him? You must be a very different person before he would care much for your worship. You can’t worship him while you think him what you do. He is something quite different.”

“Isn’t that your business? Aren’t you always making people say their prayers?”

“It is my business to help my brothers and sisters to know God, and to learn to worship him in spirit and truth—because he is altogether and perfectly true and loving and fair. Do you think he would have you worship such a being as you take him to be? If your son is in good company in the other world, he must be greatly troubled at the way you treat God—at your unfairness to him. But your bad example may, for anything I know, have sent him where he has not yet begun to learn anything.”

“God have mercy! Is the man telling me to my face that my boy is in hell!”