ne of the young soldiers who had taken the fishing-lodge at
the head of the lake. Mrs. O'Mara had hinted that Nora had been seen
with one of them on the hill, and he thought how on a day like this she
might have been led away among the ferns. At that moment there came out
of the thicket a floating ball of thistle-down. 'It bloweth where it
listeth,' he said. 'Soldier or shepherd, what matter now she is gone?'
and rising to his feet and coming down the sloping lawn, overflowing
with the shade of the larches, he climbed through the hawthorns growing
out of a crumbled wall, and once at the edge of the lake, he stood
waiting for nothing seemingly but to hear the tiresome clanking call of
the stonechat, and he compared its reiterated call with the words
'atonement,' 'forgiveness,' 'death,' 'calamity,' words always clanking
in his heart, for she might be lying at the bottom of the lake, and some
day a white phantom would rise from the water and claim him.

His thoughts broke away, and he re-lived in memory the very agony of
mind he had endured when he went home after her admission that she was
with child. All that night, all next day, and for how many days? Would
the time ever come when he could think of her without a pain in his
heart? It is said that time brings forgetfulness. Does it? On Saturday
morning he had sat at his window, asking himself if he should go down
to see her or if he should send for her. There were confessions in the
afternoon, and expecting that she would come to confess to him, he had
not sent for her. One never knows; perhaps it was her absence from
confession that had angered him. His temper took a different turn that
evening. All night he had lain awake; he must have been a little mad
that night, for he could only think of the loss of a soul to God, and of
God's love of chastity. All night long he had repeated with variations
that it were better that all which our eyes see--this earth and the
stars that are in being--should perish utterly, be crushed into dust,
rather than a mortal sin should be committed; in an extraordinary
lucidity of mind he continued to ponder on God's anger and his own
responsibility towards God, and feeling all the while that there are
times when we lose control of our minds, when we are a little mad. He
foresaw his danger, but he could not do else than rise from his bed and
begin to prepare his sermon, for he had to preach, and he could only
preach on chastity and the displeas