cause of her silence. However this might be, any words would have been
better than 'it would relieve my mind to know who the man was.' 'Stupid,
stupid, stupid!' he muttered to himself, and he wandered from the
cart-track into the wood.

It was impossible to say now why he had wished to press her secret from
her. It would be unpleasant for him, as priest of the parish, to know
that the man was living in the parish; but it would be still more
unpleasant if he knew who the man was. Nora's seducer could be none
other than one 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