Priscilla’s face changed.  “Emma?” she asked.

“Emma.  At this hour the day before yesterday she was as good a girl as any in the village.  She was good, and dutiful, and honest.  Now what is she and where is she?”

“Has she—­isn’t she in her home?”

“She never went home.”

“Then she did lose the money?”

“Lose it?  She has stolen it.  Do you not see you have deliberately made a thief out of an honest girl?”

Priscilla gazed in dismay at the avenging vicar’s wife.  It was true then, and she had the fatal gift of spoiling all she touched.

“And worse than that—­you have brought a good girl to ruin.  He’ll never marry her now.”

“He?”

“Do you not know the person she was engaged to has gone with her?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“They walked from here to Ullerton and went to London.  Her father came round to us yesterday after your uncle had been to him making inquiries, and it is all as clear as day.  Till your uncle told him, he did not know about the money, and had been too—­not well enough that day to notice Emma’s not having come home.  Your uncle’s visit sobered him.  We telegraphed to the police.  They’ve been traced to London.  That’s all.  Except,” and she glared at Priscilla with all the wrath of a prophet whose denunciations have been justified, “except that one more life is ruined.”

“I’m very sorry—­very, very sorry,” said Priscilla, so earnestly, so abjectly even, that her eyes filled with tears.  “I see now how thoughtless it was of me.”

“Thoughtless!”

“It was inexcusably thoughtless.”

“Thoughtless!” cried Mrs. Morrison again.

“If you like, it was criminally thoughtless.”

“Thoughtless!” cried Mrs. Morrison a third time.

“But it wasn’t more than thoughtless.  I’d give anything to be able to set it right.  I am most truly grieved.  But isn’t it a little hard to make me responsible?”

Mrs. Morrison stared at her as one who eyes some strange new monster.  “How amazingly selfish you are,” she said at last, in tones almost of awe.

“Selfish?” faltered Priscilla, who began to wonder what she was not.

“In the face of such total ruin, such utter shipwreck, to be thinking of what is hard on you.  You!  Why, here you are with a safe skin, free from the bitter anxieties and temptations poor people have to fight with, with so much time unoccupied that you fill it up with mischief, with more money than you know what to do with”—­Priscilla pressed her hands together—­“sheltered, free from every care”—­Priscilla opened her lips but shut them again—­“and there is that miserable Emma, hopeless, branded, for ever an outcast because of you,—­only because of you, and you think of yourself and talk of its being hard.”

Priscilla looked at Mrs. Morrison, opened her mouth to say something, shut it, opened it again, and remarked very lamely that the heart alone knows its own bitterness.