rying out for light and leading, and the _Croppy_
is going to give both. You always wanted to serve Ireland. Now I am
offering you the chance. I don't say you ought to thank me, though you
will thank me to the day of your death. I don't say that you have an
opportunity of becoming a great man. I know you, and I know a better way
of making sure of you than that. I say to you, Hyacinth Conneally, that
we want you--just _you_ and nobody else. Ireland wants you.'

The letter, especially the last part of it, was sufficiently ridiculous
to have moved Hyacinth to a smile. But it did no such thing. On the
contrary, its rhetoric excited and touched him. The flattery of the
final sentences elated him. The absurdity of the idea that Ireland
needed him, a fifth-rate office clerk, an out-of-work commercial
traveller who had failed to sell blankets and flannels, did not strike
him at all. The figure of Augusta Goold rose to his mind. She flashed
before him, an Apocalyptic angel, splended and terrible, trumpet-calling
him to the last great fight. He forgot in an instant the Quinns and
their trouble. The years of quietness in Ballymoy, the daily intercourse
with gentle people, the atmosphere of the religion in which he had
lived, fell away from him suddenly.

He sat absorbed in an ecstasy of joyful excitement until the jangling of
Canon Beecher's church bell recalled him to common life again. It speaks
for the strength of the habits he had formed in Ballymoy that he rose
without hesitation and went to take his part in the morning service.

He sat down as usual beside Marion Beecher and her harmonium. He
listened to her playing until her father entered. He found himself
gazing at her when she stood up for the opening words of the service.
He felt himself strangely affected by the gentleness of her face and the
slender beauty of her form. When she knelt down he could not take
his eyes off her. There came over him an inexplicable softening, a
relaxation of the tense excitement of the morning. He thought of her
kneeling there in the faded shabby church Sunday after Sunday for years
and years, when he was working at hot pressure far away. He knew just
how her eyes would look calmly, trustfully up to the God she spoke
to; how her soul would grow in gentleness; how love would be the very
atmosphere around her. And all the while he would struggle and fight,
with no inspiration except a bitter hate. Suddenly there came on him a
feeling that h