Nora Glynn was beautiful, and her personality was winning and charming,
her playing delightful, and her singing might have inspired the people
to cultivate beauty. But she was going to the convent. The convent had
gotten her. It was a pity. Mrs. O'Mara's scandalous stories, insinuating
lies, had angered him till he could bear with her no longer, and he had
put her out the door. He didn't believe that Eliza had ever said she
could give Nora more than she was earning in Garranard. It mattered very
little if she had, for it had so fallen out that she was going to get
her. He begrudged them Nora. But Eliza was going to get her, and he'd
have to make the best terms he could.

But he could not constrain his thoughts to the present moment. They
would go back to the fateful afternoon when he ran across the fields to
ask Nora if what Mrs. O'Mara had said of her were true. If he had only
waited! If she had come to him to confession on Saturday, as he expected
she would! If something had prevented him from preaching on Sunday! A
bad cold might have prevented him from speaking, and she might have gone
away for a while, and, when her baby was born, she might have come back.
It could have been easily arranged. But fate had ordered her life
otherwise, and here he was in the Tinnick Convent, hoping to make her
some poor amends for the wrong he had done her. Would Eliza help
him?--that was the question he asked himself as he crossed the
beeswaxed floor and stood looking at the late afternoon sunlight
glancing through the trees, falling across the green sward.

'How do you do, Oliver?'

His face lighted up, but it changed expression and became gray again. He
had expected to see Eliza, tall and thin, with yellow eyebrows and pale