From Father Oliver Gogarty to Miss Nora Glynn.

’GAHRANARD, Bohola,

’June 2, 19—.

’Dear miss Glynn,

’I must write to thank you for your kindness in asking Father O’Grady to send me a letter.  It appears that you were afraid I might be anxious about you, and I have been very anxious.  I have suffered a great deal since you left, and it is a great relief to my mind to hear that you are safe and well.  I can understand how loath you were to allow Father O’Grady to write to me; he doesn’t say in his letter that you have forgiven me, but I hope that your permission to him to relieve my anxiety by a letter implies your forgiveness.  Father O’Grady writes very kindly; it appears that everybody is kind except me.  But I am thinking of myself again, of the ruin that it would have been if any of the terrible things that have happened to others had happened to you.  But I cannot think of these things now; I am happy in thinking that you are safe.’

The evening post was lost, but if he were to walk to Bohola he would catch the morning mail, and his letter would be in her hands the day after to-morrow.  It was just three miles to Bohola, and the walk there, he thought, would calm the extraordinary spiritual elation that news of Nora had kindled in his brain.  The darkness of the night and the almost round moon high in the southern horizon suited his mood.  Once he was startled by a faint sigh coming from a horse looking over a hedge, and the hedgerows were full of mysterious little cracklings.  Something white ran across the road.  ‘The white belly of a stoat,’ he thought; and he walked on, wondering what its quest might be.

The road led him through a heavy wood, and when he came out at the other end he stopped to gaze at the stars, for already a grayness seemed to have come into the night.  The road dipped and turned, twisting through gray fields full of furze-bushes, leading to a great hill, on the other side of which was Bohola.  When he entered the village he wondered at the stillness of its street.  ‘The dawn is like white ashes,’ he said, as he dropped his letters into the box; and he was glad to get away from the shadowy houses into the country road.  The daisies and the dandelions were still tightly shut, and in the hedgerow a half-awakened chaffinch hopped from twig to twig, too sleepy to chirrup.  A streak of green appeared in the east, and the death-like stillness was broken by cock-crows.  He could hear them far away in the country and close by, and when he entered his village a little bantam walked up the road shrilling and clapping his wings, advancing to the fight.  The priest admired his courage, and allowed him to peck at his knees.  Close by Tom Mulhare’s dorking was crowing hoarsely, ‘A hoarse bass,’ said the priest, and at the end of the village he heard a bird crowing an octave higher, and from the direction he guessed it must be Catherine Murphy’s bird.  Another cock, and then another.  He listened, judging their voices to range over nearly three octaves.