They went out of the school-house talking in quite a friendly way.  There was a little drizzle in the air, and, opening her umbrella, she said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll get wet.’  ‘Get wet, get wet! what matter?’ he had answered impatiently, for the remark annoyed him.  By the hawthorn-bush he began to tell her again that it would relieve his mind to know who the man was.  She tried to get away from him, but he wouldn’t let her go; and catching her by the arm he besought her, saying that it would relieve his mind.  How many times had he said that?  But he wasn’t able to persuade her, notwithstanding his insistence that as a priest of the parish he had a right to know.  No doubt she had some very deep reason for keeping her secret, or perhaps his authoritative manner was the 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 to see her or if he should send for her.  There were confessions in the afternoon, and expecting that she would come to confess to him, he had not sent for her.  One never knows; perhaps it was her absence from confession that had angered him.  His temper took a different turn that evening.