A few days after this first meeting he met her about two miles from Garranard; he was on his bicycle, she was on hers, and they both leaped instinctively from their machines.  What impressed him this time far more than her looks was her happy, original mind.  While walking beside her he caught himself thinking that he had never seen a really happy face before.  But she was going to be sent away because she was happy and wore her soul in her face.

They had seemed unable to get away from each other, so much had they to say.  He mentioned his brother James, who was doing well in America and would perhaps one day send them the price of a harmonium.  She told him she couldn’t play on the wheezy old thing at Garranard, and at the moment he clean forgot that the new harmonium would avail her little, since Father Peter was going to get rid of her; he only remembered it as he got on his bicycle, and he returned home ready to espouse her cause against anybody.

She must write to the Archbishop, and if he wouldn’t do anything she must write to the papers.  Influence must be brought to bear, and Father Peter must be prevented from perpetrating a gross injustice.  He felt that it would be impossible for him to remain Father Peter’s curate if the schoolmistress were sent away for no fault of hers, merely because she wore a happy face.  What Father Peter would have done if he had lived no one would ever know.  He might have dismissed her; even so the injustice would have been slight compared with what had happened to her; and the memory of the wrong that had been done to her put such a pain into his heart that he seemed to lose sight of everything, till a fish leaping in the languid lake awoke him, and he walked on, absorbed in the memory of his mistake, his thoughts swinging back to the day he had met her on the roadside, and to the events that succeeded their meeting.  Father Peter was taken ill, two days after he was dead, before the end of the week he was in his coffin; and it was left to him to turn Nora Glynn out of the parish.  No doubt other men had committed faults as grave as his; but they had the strength to leave the matter in the hands of God, to say:  ’I can do nothing, I must put myself in the hands of God; let him judge.  He is all wise.’  He hadn’t their force of character.  He believed as firmly as they did, but, for some reason which he couldn’t explain to himself, he was unable to leave the matter in God’s hands, and was always thinking how he could get news of her.

If it hadn’t been for that woman, for that detestable Mrs. O’Mara, who was the cause of so much evil-speaking in the parish!...  And with his heart full of hatred so black that it surprised him, he asked himself if he could forgive that woman.  God might, he couldn’t.  And he fell to thinking how Mrs. O’Mara had long been a curse upon the parish.  Father Peter was more than once compelled to speak about her from the altar, and to make plain that the