to Nora was preying on his conscience, and that he’d never be happy until he had made atonement—­that was the light in which she would view the matter, so it would be better to let things take their natural course and to avoid making plans.  The more he thought of what he should say to Eliza, the less likely was he to speak effectively; and feeling that he had better rely on the inspiration of the moment, he sought distraction from his errand by noting the beauty of the hillside.  He had always liked the way the road dipped and then ascended steeply to the principal street in the town.  There were some pretty houses in the dip—­houses with narrow doorways and long windows, built, no doubt, in the beginning of the nineteenth century—­and his ambition was once to live in one of these houses.

The bridge was an eighteenth-century bridge, with a foaming weir on the left, and on the right there was a sentimental walk under linden-trees, and there were usually some boys seated on the parapet fishing.  He would have liked to stop the car, so remote did the ruined mills seem—­so like things of long ago that time had mercifully weaned from the stress and struggle of life.

At the corner of the main street was the house in which he was born.  The business had passed into other hands, but the old name—­’Gogarty’s Drapery Stores’—­remained.  Across the way were the butcher and the grocer, and a little higher up the inn at which the commercial travellers lodged.  He recalled their numerous leather trunks, and for a moment stood a child again, seeing them drive away on post-cars.  A few more shops had been added—­very few—­and then the town dwindled quickly, slated roofs giving way to thatched cottages, and of the same miserable kind that was wont to provoke his antipathy when he was a boy.

This sinful dislike of poverty he overcame in early manhood.  A high religious enthusiasm enabled him to overcome it, but his instinctive dislike of the lowly life—­intellectual lowliness as well as physical—­gathered within these cottages, seemed to have returned again.  He asked himself if he were wanting in natural compassion, and if all that he had of goodness in him were a debt he owed to the Church.  It was in patience rather than in pity maybe that he was lacking; and pursuing this idea, he recalled the hopes he entertained when he railed off a strip of ground in front of Bridget Clery’s house.  But that strip of garden had inspired no spirit of emulation.  Eliza was perhaps more patient than he, and he began to wonder if she had any definite aim in view, and if the spectacle of the convent, with its show of nuns walking under the trees, would eventually awaken some desire of refinement in the people, if the money their farms now yielded would produce some sort of improvement in their cottages, the removal of those dreadfully heavy smells, and a longing for colour that would find expression in the planting of flowers.