buy two
suits of clothes in Tinnick and give one to Pat Kearney, he might wrap
the other one in a bundle, and place it on the rocks on the Joycetown
side. It was not likely that the shopman in Tinnick would remember,
after three months, that he had sold two suits to the priest; but should
he remember this, the explanation would be that he had bought them for
Pat Kearney. Now, looking at this poor man who had come to ask him if he
would marry him for a pound, the priest was lost in wonder.

'So you're going to be married, Pat?'

And Pat, who hadn't spoken to anyone since the woman whose potatoes he
was digging said she'd as soon marry him as another, began to chatter,
and to ramble in his chatter. There was so much to tell that he did not
know how to tell it. There was his rent and the woman's holding, for now
they would have nine acres of land, money would be required to stock it,
and he didn't know if the bank would lend him the money. Perhaps the
priest would help him to get it.

'But why did you come to me to marry you? Aren't you two miles nearer
to Father Moran than you are to me?'

Pat hesitated, not liking to say that he would be hard set to get round
Father Moran. So he began to talk of the Egans and the Reans. For hadn't
he heard, as he came up the street, that Mrs. Rean had stolen the child
from Mrs. Egan, and had had it baptized by the minister? And he hoped to
obtain the priest's sympathy by saying:

'What a terrible thing it was that the police should allow a black
Protestant to steal a Catholic child, and its mother a Catholic and all
her people before her!'

'When Mrs. Rean snatched the child, it hadn't been baptized, and was
neither a Catholic nor a Protestant,' the priest said maliciously.

Pat Kearney, whose theological knowledge did not extend very far,
remained silent, and the priest was glad of his silence, for he was
thinking that in a few minutes he would catch sight of the square
whitewashed school-house on the hillside by the pine-wood, and the
thought came into his mind that he would like to see again the place
where he and Nora once stood talking together. But a long field lay
between his house and the school-house, and what would it avail him to
see the empty room? He looked, instead, for the hawthorn-bush by which
he and Nora had lingered, and it was a sad pleasure to think how she had
gone up the road after bidding him good-bye.

But Pat Kearney began to talk again of how he could