Nora had told him of herself:  she had announced to the monitresses, who were discussing their ambitions, that hers was to be the secretary of a man of letters.  ’So it would seem that she had an instinct of her destiny from the beginning, just as I had of mine.  But had I?  Her path took an odd turn round by Garranard.  But she has reached her goal, or nearly.  The end may be marriage—­with whom?  Poole most likely.  Be that as it may, she will pass on to middle age; we shall grow older and seas and continents will divide our graves.  Why did she come to Garranard?’

From Father Oliver Gogarty to Miss Nora Glynn.

’September 10, 19—.

’DEAR MISS GLYNN,

’I received your letter this morning, written from Antwerp, and it has set me thinking that Mr. Poole’s interests in scholarship must have procured for him many acquaintances among Dutch scholars, men with whom he has been in correspondence.  You will meet them and hear them pour their vast erudition across dinner-tables.  Rubens’ great picture, “The Descent from the Cross,” is in Antwerp; you will go to see it, and in Munich Mr. Poole will treat you to the works of Wagner and Mozart.  You are very happy; everything has gone well with you, and it would ill befit me, who brought so much unhappiness upon you, to complain that you are too happy, too much intent on the things of this world.  Yet, if you will allow me to speak candidly, I will tell you what I really think.  You are changing; the woman I once knew hardly corresponds with the woman who writes to me.  In reading the letters of the English Nora, I perceive many traces here and there of the Irish Nora, for the Irish Nora was not without a sense of duty, of kindness towards others, but the English Nora seems bent upon a life of pleasure, intellectual and worldly adventures.  She delights in foreign travel, and no doubt places feelings above ideas, and regards our instincts as our sovereign guides.  Now, when we find ourselves delighting to this extent in the visible, we may be sure that our lives have wandered far away from spiritual things.  There is ever a divorce between the world of sense and the world of spirit, and the question of how much love we may expend upon external things will always arise, and will always be a cause of perplexity to those who do not choose to abandon themselves to the general drift of sensual life.  This question is as difficult as the cognate question of what are our duties toward ourselves and our duties toward others.  And your letters raise all these questions.  I ponder them in my walks by the lake in the afternoon.  In the evening in my house on the hilltop I sit thinking, seeing in imagination the country where I have been born and where I have always lived—­the lake winding in and out of headlands, the highroad shaded by sycamores at one spot, a little further on wandering like a gray thread among barren lands, with here and there a village; and I make application of all the suggestions your letters contain to my own case.  Every house in Garranard I know, and I see each gable end and each doorway as I sit thinking, and all the faces of my parishioners.  I see lights springing up far and near.  Wherever there is a light there is a poor family.