The Scoffer

A devout physician, Stannard Wayne, weds Alice Porn, the former mistress of his libertine colleague Arthur Richards, and is promptly framed for Richards’s back-alley abortion, condemned to five iron years that transmute his piety into corrosive scorn. Emerging embittered, he drifts to a mist-lashed Northwest hamlet where fate has already installed his betrayer and the woman who once wore both their rings. There Margaret Haddon—a quiet zealot of compassion—pleads with the scoffer to mend a boy hobbled by paternal sadism; Wayne balks, then yields, scalpel in shaking hand. While he cuts, Richards’s torch-bearing chorus clamors outside; in the crucible of that chaos Wayne implores the heavens, and a miracle—luminous, preposterous—restores both the child’s legs and the doctor’s abandoned faith.