Ezra Sheppard was by profession a market-gardener, and his favourite recreation was preaching in a barn.  We have the picture of a frugal but happy interior, with a new-born infant (off).  The trouble began with an offer made to his wife of a situation as foster-mother to the baby (also off) of a neighbouring Countess.  The wages were to be high and she was to be delicately entreated; but there were hard conditions.  She was not to hold communication with her husband or child for twelve months.  I am sorry to say that Mary did not flinch from these conditions quite so much as I could have hoped. Ezra, however, rejected them for her with manly scorn, until he was reminded that the high wages would speed the end of his own ambitions—­namely, to replace his barn with a conventicle of brick.  So he let his wife loose into Eden with the Serpent.

And now we see Mary seated in the lap of luxury, with soft gowns to wear, and peaches to eat and instant slaves at her beck.  You will, of course, expect her virtue to fall an easy prey; but you will be wrong.  The Earl’s attitude is pleasantly parental, and the attentions of the Countess’s cavalier—­an author—­are confined to the extraction of copy.  And anyhow Mary’s instincts are sound.  Now and again she remembers to pity the loneliness of her husband, whose cottage light she can see from the window of her bower; and once, by a ruse, she gets him to break the conditions and visit her; but when he learns that the invitation came from her, and not, as alleged, from the Countess, his conscience will not permit him to take advantage of his chance.  So you have the unusual spectacle of a true and loving wife pleading in vain for the embraces of her true and loving husband.

But if her virtue, in the technical sense, remained intact, the Serpent had overfed her with pommes de luxe.  On her return home—­where the restoration of her child might have helped matters, but it doesn’t know who she is and refuses to part from its foster-mother—­we find her lethargic, off her feed, indifferent to the claims of menial toil, and clamorous (as I have shown) for her rights of the daily bath.

In the first joy of conjugal reunion Ezra consents to tolerate the discomfort of this change, but in the end he loses patience and hits her.  She leaves for London the same afternoon.

Six black months pass over the husband’s bowed head, and then, on a very windy night (the wind was well done), she makes a re-entry, and confesses that, under stress of need, she has lapsed from virtue.  This is bad news for Ezra, but he is prepared to forgive a fault in which he himself has had a fair share.  Only there must be a sacrifice of something, if moral justice is to be appeased.  So he chooses between his wife and his chapel and does execution on the latter.  He goes out into the storm and sets the thing alight.  His conscience is thus purified by fire, the gale being favourable to arson.