He had come to ask Father Oliver if he would marry him for a pound, but, as Father Oliver didn’t answer him, he fell to thinking that it was his clothes that the priest was admiring, ’for hadn’t his reverence given him the clothes himself?  And if it weren’t for the self-same clothes, he wouldn’t have the pound in his pocket to give the priest to marry him,’

‘It was yourself, your reverence—­’

‘Yes, I remember very well.’

Pat had come to tell him that there was work to be had in Tinnick, but that he didn’t dare to show himself in Tinnick for lack of clothes, and he stood humbly before the priest in a pair of corduroy trousers that hardly covered his nakedness.

And it was as Father Oliver stood examining and pitying his parishioner’s poverty it had occurred to him that, if he were to buy two suits of clothes in Tinnick and give one to Pat Kearney, he might wrap the other one in a bundle, and place it on the rocks on the Joycetown side.  It was not likely that the shopman in Tinnick would remember, after three months, that he had sold two suits to the priest; but should he remember this, the explanation would be that he had bought them for Pat Kearney.  Now, looking at this poor man who had come to ask him if he would marry him for a pound, the priest was lost in wonder.

‘So you’re going to be married, Pat?’

And Pat, who hadn’t spoken to anyone since the woman whose potatoes he was digging said she’d as soon marry him as another, began to chatter, and to ramble in his chatter.  There was so much to tell that he did not know how to tell it.  There was his rent and the woman’s holding, for now they would have nine acres of land, money would be required to stock it, and he didn’t know if the bank would lend him the money.  Perhaps the priest would help him to get it.

’But why did you come to me to marry you?  Aren’t you two miles nearer to Father Moran than you are to me?’

Pat hesitated, not liking to say that he would be hard set to get round Father Moran.  So he began to talk of the Egans and the Reans.  For hadn’t he heard, as he came up the street, that Mrs. Rean had stolen the child from Mrs. Egan, and had had it baptized by the minister?  And he hoped to obtain the priest’s sympathy by saying: 

’What a terrible thing it was that the police should allow a black Protestant to steal a Catholic child, and its mother a Catholic and all her people before her!’

’When Mrs. Rean snatched the child, it hadn’t been baptized, and was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant,’ the priest said maliciously.

Pat Kearney, whose theological knowledge did not extend very far, remained silent, and the priest was glad of his silence, for he was thinking that in a few minutes he would catch sight of the square whitewashed school-house on the hillside by the pine-wood, and the thought came into his mind that he would like to see again the place where he and Nora once stood talking together.  But a long field lay between his house and the school-house, and what would it avail him to see the empty room?  He looked, instead, for the hawthorn-bush by which he and Nora had lingered, and it was a sad pleasure to think how she had gone up the road after bidding him good-bye.