and end. Pass me the tobacco, will you?'

Father Moran began to fill his pipe, and when he had finished filling
it, he said:

'Now I must be going, and don't be trying to keep me; I've stopped long
enough. If I were sent for a purpose--'

'But you don't believe seriously, Moran, that you were sent for a
purpose?' Moran didn't answer, and his silence irritated Father Oliver,
and, determined to probe his curate's conscience, he said: 'Aren't you
satisfied now that it was only an idea of your own? You thought to find
me gone, and here I am sitting before you.' After waiting for some time
for Moran to speak, he said: 'You haven't answered me.'

'What should I be answering?'

'Do you still think you were sent for a purpose?'

'Well, I do.'

'You do?'

The priests stood looking at each other for a while.

'Can't you give a reason?'

'No; I can give no reason. It's a feeling. I know I haven't reason on my
side. There you are before me.'

'It's very queer.'

He would have liked to have called back Moran. It seemed a pity to let
him go without having probed this matter to the bottom. He hadn't asked
him if he had any idea in his mind about the future, as to what was
going to happen; but it was too late now. 'Why did he come here
disturbing me with his beliefs,' he cried out, 'poisoning my will?' for
he had already begun to fear that Moran's visit might come between him
and his project. The wind sighed a little louder, and Father Oliver
said: 'I wouldn't be minding his coming here to warn me, though he did
say that it wasn't of his own will that he came, but something from the
outside that kept pushing him along the road--I wouldn't be minding all
that if this wind hadn't risen. But the omen may be a double one.' At
that moment the wind shook the trees about the house, and he fell to
thinking that if he had started to swim the lake that night he would be
now somewhere between Castle Island and the Joycetown shore, in the
deepest and windiest part of the lake. 'And pretty well tired I'd be at
the time. If I'd started to-night a corpse would be floating about by
now.' The wind grew louder. Father Oliver imagined the waves slapping in
his face, and then he imagined them slapping about the face of a corpse
drifting towards the Joycetown shore.

XIV

There was little sleep in him that night, and turning on his pillow, he
sought sleep vainly, getting up at last when the dawn looked through the
curtains. A win