‘I don’t know what manner of man he is in his body,’ said Father Oliver, ’but his mind is more dangerous.  An intellectual influence is always more dangerous than a sensual influence, and the sins of faith are worse than the sins of the flesh.  I never thought of him as a possible seducer.  But there may be that danger too.  I still think, Father O’Grady, that you might have warned Nora of her danger.  Forgive me; I’m sure you did all that was necessary.  You do forgive me?’

The men’s eyes met, and Father O’Grady said, as if he wished to change the subject: 

‘You were born at Tinnick, were you not?’

‘Yes, I was born in Tinnick,’ Father Oliver repeated mechanically, almost as if he had not heard the question.

‘And your sisters are nuns?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Tell me how it all came about.’

‘How all what came about?’ Father Oliver asked, for he was a little dazed and troubled in his mind, and was, therefore, easily led to relate the story of the shop in Tinnick, his very early religious enthusiasms, and how he remembered himself always as a pious lad.  On looking into the years gone by, he said that he saw himself more often than not by his bedside rapt in innocent little prayers.  And afterwards at school he had been considered a pious lad.  He rambled on, telling his story almost unconsciously, getting more thoughtful as he advanced into it, relating carefully the absurd episode of the hermitage in which, to emulate the piety of the old time, he chose Castle Island as a suitable spot for him to live in.

Father O’Grady listened, seriously moved by the story; and Father Oliver continued it, telling how Eliza, coming to see the priest in him, gave up her room to him as soon as their cousin the Bishop was consulted.  And it was at this point of the narrative that Father O’Grady put a question.

‘Was no attempt,’ he asked, ’made to marry you to some girl with a big fortune?’

And Father Oliver told of his liking for Annie McGrath and of his aversion for marriage, acquiescing that aversion might be too strong a word; indifference would more truthfully represent him.

’I wasn’t interested in Annie McGrath nor in any woman as far as I can remember until this unfortunate conduct of mine awakened an interest in Nora Glynn.  And it would be strange, indeed, if it hadn’t awakened an interest in me,’ he muttered to himself.  Father O’Grady suppressed the words that rose up in his mind, ‘Now I’m beginning to understand.’  And Father Oliver continued, like one talking to himself:  ’I’m thinking that I was singularly free from all temptations of the sensual life, especially those represented by womankind.  I was ordained early, when I was twenty-two, and as soon as I began to hear confessions, the things that surprised me the most were the stories relating to those passionate attachments that men experience for women and women for men—­attachments which sometimes are so intense that if the sufferer cannot obtain relief by the acquiescence of the object of their affections, he, if it be he, she, if it be she, cannot refrain from suicide.  There have been cases of men and women going mad because their love was not reciprocated, and I used to listen to these stories wonderingly, unable to understand, bored by the relation.’