coming, but he couldn’t do so now without betraying his intention, and he stayed where he was.  The women passed on, bent under their loads.  Whether they saw him or not he couldn’t tell; they passed near enough for him to recognize them, and he remembered that they were in church the day he alluded to Nora in his sermon.  A hundred yards further on the women unburdened and sat down to rest a while, and Father Oliver began to consider what their conversation might be.  His habit of wandering away by himself had no doubt been noticed, and once it was noticed it would become a topic of conversation.  ’And what they do be saying now is, “That he has never been the same man since he preached against the schoolmistress, for what should he be doing by the lake if he wasn’t afraid that she made away with herself?” And perhaps they are right,’ he said, and walked up the shore, hoping that as soon as he was out of sight the women would forget to tell when they returned home that they had seen him walking by the lake.

All the morning he had been trying to keep Nora Glynn out of his mind, but now, as he rambled, he could not put back the memory of the day he met her for the first time, nearly two years ago, for to-day was the fifteenth of May; it was about that time a little later in the year; it must have been in June, for the day was very hot, and he had been riding fast, not wishing to keep Catherine’s dinner waiting, and as he pushed his bicycle through the gate, he saw the great cheery man, Father Peter, with a face like an apple, walking up and down under the sycamores reading his breviary.  It must have been in June, for the mowers were in the field opposite, in the field known as the priest’s field, though Father Peter had never rented it.  There had never been such weather in Ireland before, and the day he rode his bicycle over to see Father Peter seemed to him the hottest day of all.  But he had heard of the new schoolmistress’s musical talents, and despite the heat of the day had ridden over, so anxious was he to hear if Father Peter were satisfied with her in all other respects.  ’We shall be able to talk better in the shade of the sycamores,’ Father Peter said, and on this they crossed the lawn, but not many steps were taken back and forth before Father Peter began to throw out hints that he didn’t think Miss Glynn was altogether suited to the parish.

‘But if you’re satisfied with her discipline,’ Father Oliver jerked out, and it was all he could do to check himself from further snaps at the parish priest, a great burly man who could not tell a minor from a major chord, yet was venting the opinion that good singing distracted the attention of the congregation at their prayers.  He would have liked to ask him if he was to understand that bad singing tended to a devotional mood, but wishing to remain on good terms with his superior, he said nothing and waited for Father Peter to state his case against the new schoolmistress, which he seemed to think could be done by speaking of the danger of young unmarried women in the parish.  It was when they came to the break in the trees that Father Peter nudged him and said under his breath: