If there was no other, there was at least one woman in Ireland who was interested in things.  He had never met anybody less interested in opinions or in ideas than Eliza.  They had walked home together in silence, at all events not saying much, and that very evening she left the room immediately after supper.  And soon after they heard sounds of trunks being dragged along the passage; furniture was being moved, and when she came downstairs she just said she was going to sleep with Mary.

’Oliver is going to have my room.  He must have a room to himself on account of his studies.’

On that she gathered up her sewing, and left him to explain.  He felt that it was rather sly of her to go away like that, leaving all the explanation to him.  She wanted him to be a priest, and was full of little tricks.  There was no time for thinking it over.  There was only just time to prepare for the examination.  He worked hard, for his work interested him, especially the Latin language; but what interested him far more than his aptitude for learning whatever he made up his mind to learn was the discovery of a religious vocation in himself.  Eliza feared that his interest in hermits sprang from a boyish taste for adventure rather than from religious feeling, but no sooner had he begun his studies for the priesthood, than he found himself overtaken and overpowered by an extraordinary religious fervour and by a desire for prayer and discipline.  Never had a boy left home more zealous, more desirous to excel in piety and to strive for the honour and glory of the Church.

An expression of anger, almost of hatred, passed over Father Oliver’s face, and he turned from the lake and walked a few yards rapidly, hoping to escape from memories of his folly; for he had made a great fool of himself, no doubt.  But, after all, he preferred his enthusiasms, however exaggerated they might seem to him now, to the commonplace—­he could not call it wisdom—­of those whom he had taken into his confidence.  It was foolish of him, no doubt, to have told how he used to go out in a boat and measure the ground about Castle Island, thinking to build himself a beehive hut out of the ruins.  He knew too little of the world at that time; he had no idea how incapable the students were of understanding anything outside the narrow interests of an ecclesiastical career.  Anyhow, he had had the satisfaction of having beaten them in all the examinations; and if he had cared to go in for advancement, he could have easily got ahead of them all, for he had better brains and better interest than any of them.  When he last saw that ignorant brute Peter Fahy, Fahy asked him if he still put pebbles in his shoes.  It was to Fahy he had confided the cause of his lameness, and Fahy had told on him; he was ridiculously innocent in those days, and he could still see them gathered about him, pretending not to believe that he kept a cat-o’-nine-tails in his room, and scourged himself at night.  It was Tom Bryan who said that he wouldn’t mind betting a couple of shillings that Gogarty’s whip wouldn’t draw a squeal from a pig on the roadside.  The answer to that was:  ’A touch will make a pig squeal:  you should have said an ass!’ But at the moment he couldn’t think of an answer.