She broke down into harsh sobs, crying childishly, and in between her sobbing he could hear her babble the same curious mixture of scriptural and unscriptural lamentation. She talked so wildly that he thought the old woman was going off her head. When she sobbed the jet ornaments on her bonnet danced. ‘Come home along of me, ma’am,’ he repeated helplessly. She seemed not to hear him. ‘George, my little George . . .’ she sobbed, abasing, accusing herself before the harsh personal deity that she imagined, wrestling with him in prayer and entreaty, ‘Oh, Lord, forgive him . . . forgive him . . . forgive him!’ Then, quite suddenly, she stopped. No sound was heard but that of her faint trembling. Abner thanked goodness that she had tired herself out, but he was mistaken. Without the least warning her weak hands pushed him away. She stood before him in the middle of the road and faced him with her ridiculous bonnet awry and her fingers clenched like the claws of some small, fierce wild animal, waiting to spring at a man’s throat. Her wrists worked with passion. She forgot all her scripture and cursed him in her own words. ‘It’s you who’ve led him astray,’ she cried. ‘You . . you! Didn’t I know it the very day when you and your mate came to our house? You, the scum of the roads! That’s fine company for a decent man! You can’t touch pitch and not be defiled! I begged him and begged him not to have the likes of you in his house, but he laughed at me. And you’ve dragged him down, down . . . as low as a man can be dragged. You with your drink and your poaching and your women! Don’t think I haven’t heard what happened . . . the two of you coming home drunk of nights, singing bawdy songs in the dark. That wasn’t enough for you! You must drag him into your drunken fighting, drag him down and down into your mucky life. And then you come and talk to me of luck. Luck! He’s been led astray, that’s what George has, by your company. If George’s soul is damned, it’s you who will suffer for it, bringin’ your town ways into a country place. You and his precious wife! The two of you between you! What’s in the blood comes out in the life. Her father were a thief and a swindler and a suicide, and God visits the sins of the fathers. Like father, like daughter! That’s the sort of bedfellow my George has had, and this is what she’s brought him to, poor lamb! But don’t you think, young man, that God don’t remember! If you done it to the least of these you done it unto Me! Don’t you think you can push a young man into hell and not fall into the fire after him. You and her together. . . . You can trust God for that!’ She exhausted her breath and stood panting. ‘Come on, missus,’ said Abner heavily. ‘You’ll be perished out here.’ But when he clumsily approached her she ran away down the road toward Mainstone like a mad woman, this pathetic bundle of burning hatred in her Sunday clothes, and left him foolishly standing.