One January night the Independent minister of Clinton Magna was passing down the village street.  Clinton lay robed in light snow, and ’sparkling to the moon.’  The frozen pond beside the green, though it was nearly eight o’clock, was still alive with children, sliding and shouting.  All around the gabled roofs stood laden and spotless.  The woods behind the village, and those running along the top of the snowy hill, were meshed in a silvery mist which died into the moonlit blue, while in the fields the sharpness of the shadows thrown by the scattered trees made a marvel of black and white.

The minister, in spite of a fighting creed, possessed a measure of gentler susceptibilities, and the beauty of this basin in the chalk hills, this winter triumphant, these lights of home and fellowship in the cottage windows disputing with the forlornness of the snow, crept into his soul.  His mind travelled from the physical purity and hardness before him to the purity and hardness of the inner life—­the purity that Christ blessed, the ‘hardness’ that the Christian endures.  And such thoughts brought him pleasure as he walked—­the mystic’s pleasure.

Suddenly he saw a woman cross the snowy green in front of him.  She had come from the road leading to the hill, and her pace was hurried.  Her shawl was muffled round her head, but he recognised her, and his mood fell.  She was the wife of Isaac Costrell, and she was hurrying to the ‘Spotted Deer,’ a public-house which lay just beyond the village, on the road to the mill.  Already several times that week had he seen her going in or coming out.  Talk had begun to reach him, and he said to himself to-night, as he saw her, that Isaac Costrell’s wife was going to ruin.

The thought oppressed him, pricked his pastoral conscience.  Isaac was his right-hand man:  dull to all the rest of the world, but not dull to the minister.  With Mr. Drew sometimes he would break into talk of religion, and the man’s dark eyes would lose their film.  His big troubled self spoke with that accent of truth which lifts common talk and halting texts to poetry.  The minister, himself more of a pessimist than his sermons showed, felt a deep regard for him.  Could nothing be done to save Isaac’s wife and Isaac?  Not so long ago Bessie Costrell had been a decent woman, though a flighty and excitable one.  Now some cause, unknown to the minister, had upset a wavering balance, and was undoing a life.

As he passed the public-house a man came out, and through the open door Mr. Drew caught a momentary glimpse of the bar and the drinkers.  Bessie’s handsome, reckless head stood out an instant in the bright light.

Then Drew saw that the man who had emerged was Watson the policeman.  They greeted each other cordially and walked on together.  Watson also was a member of the minister’s flock.  Mr. Drew felt suddenly moved to unburden himself.

‘That was Costrell’s wife, Watson, wasn’t it, poor thing?’