If Father Oliver had looked up at that moment, Father O’Grady’s eyes would have told him that he had revealed himself, and that perhaps Father O’Grady now knew more about him than he knew himself.  But without withdrawing his eyes from the fire he continued talking till Catherine’s step was heard outside.

‘She’s coming to lay the cloth for our tea,’ Father Oliver said.  And Father O’Grady answered: 

‘I shall be glad of a cup of tea.’

‘Must you really go after tea?’ Father Oliver asked; and again he begged Father O’Grady to stay for dinner.  But Father O’Grady, as if he felt that the object of his visit had been accomplished, spoke of the drive back to Tinnick and of the convenience of the branch line of railway.  It was a convenience certainly, but it was also an inconvenience, owing to the fact that the trains run from Tinnick sometimes missed the mail train; and this led Father Oliver to speak of the work he was striving to accomplish, the roofing of Kilronan Abbey, and many other things, and the time passed without their feeling it till the car came round to take Father O’Grady away.

‘He goes as a dream goes,’ Father Oliver said, and a few minutes afterwards he was sitting alone by his turf fire, asking himself in what dreams differed from reality.  For like a dream Father O’Grady had come and he had gone, never to return.  ‘But does anything return?’ he asked himself, and he looked round his room, wondering why the chairs and tables did not speak to him, and why life was not different from what it was.  He could hear Catherine at work in the kitchen preparing his dinner, she would bring it to him as she had done yesterday, he would eat it, he would sit up smoking his pipe for a while, and about eleven o’clock go to his bed.  He would lie down in it, and rise and say Mass and see his parishioners.  All these things he had done many times before, and he would go on doing them till the day of his death—­Until the day of my death,’ he repeated, ’never seeing her again, never seeing him.  Why did he come here?’ And he was surprised that he could find no answer to any of the questions that he put to himself.  ’Nothing will happen again in my life—­nothing of any interest.  This is the end!  And if I did go to London, of what should I speak to him?  It will be better to try to forget it all, and return, if I can, to the man I was before I knew her;’ and he stood stock still, thinking that without this memory he would not be himself.

Father O’Grady’s coming had been a pleasure to him, for they had talked together; he had confessed to him; had been shriven.  At that moment he caught sight of a newspaper upon his table. ‘Illustrated England,’ he muttered, his thoughts half away; and he fell to wondering how it had come into the house.  ‘Father O’Grady must have left it,’ he said, and began to unroll the paper.  But while unrolling it he stopped.  Half his mind was still away, and he sat for fully ten minutes lost in sad sensations, and it was the newspaper slipping from his hand that awoke him.  The first thing that caught his eye on opening the paper was an interview with Mr. Walter Poole, embellished with many photographs of Beechwood Hall.