be thousands of miles away,
describing a great flood or a railway accident. The journalist has no
time to make friends, and he lives in no place long enough to know it
intimately; passing acquaintance and exterior aspects of things are his
share of the world. And it was in quest of such vagrancy of ideas and
affections that he was going.

At that moment a sudden sound in the wood startled him from his reverie,
and he peered, a scared expression on his face, certain that the noise
he had heard was Father Moran's footstep. It was but a hare lolloping
through the underwood, and wondering at the disappointment he felt, he
asked if he were disappointed that Moran had not come again to stop him.
He didn't think he was, only the course of his life had been so long
dependent on a single act of will that a hope had begun in his mind that
some outward event might decide his fate for him. Last month he was full
of courage, his nerves were like iron; to-day he was a poor vacillating
creature, walking in a hazel-wood, uncertain lest delay had taken the
savour out of his adventure, his attention distracted by the sounds of
the wood, by the snapping of a dry twig, by a leaf falling through the
branches.

'Time is passing,' he said, 'and I must decide whether I go to America
to write newspaper articles, or stay at home to say Mass--a simple
matter, surely.'

The ordinary newspaper article he thought he could do as well as
another--in fact, he knew he could. But could he hope that in time his
mind would widen and deepen sufficiently to enable him to write
something worth writing, something that might win her admiration?
Perhaps, when he had shed all his opinions. Many had gone already, more
would follow, and one day he would be as free as she was. She had been a
great intellectual stimulus, and soon he began to wonder how it was that
all the paraphernalia of religion interested him no longer, how he
seemed to have suddenly outgrown the things belonging to the ages of
faith, and the subtle question, if passion were essential to the growth
of the mind, arose. For it seemed to him that his mind had grown, though
he had not read the Scriptures, and he doubted if the reading of the
Scriptures would have taught him as much as Nora's beauty. 'After all,'
he said, 'woman's beauty is more important to the world than a scroll.'
He had begun to love and to put his trust in what was natural,
spontaneous, instinctive, and might succeed in New Yor