This lake was beautiful, but he was tired of its low gray shores; he was tired of those mountains, melancholy as Irish melodies, and as beautiful.  He felt suddenly that he didn’t want to see a lake or a mountain for two months at least, and that his longing for a change was legitimate and most natural.  It pleased him to remember that everyone likes to get out of his native country for a while, and he had only been out of sight of this lake in the years he spent in Maynooth.  On leaving he had pleaded that he might be sent to live among the mountains by Kilronan Abbey, at the north end of the lake, but when Father Conway died he was moved round to the western shore; and every day since he walked by the lake, for there was nowhere else to walk, unless up and down the lawn under the sycamores, imitating Father Peter, whose wont it was to walk there, reading his breviary, stopping from time to time to speak to a parishioner in the road below; he too used to read his breviary under the sycamores; but for one reason or another he walked there no longer, and every afternoon now found him standing at the end of this sandy spit, looking across the lake towards Tinnick, where he was born, and where his sisters lived.

He couldn’t see the walls of the convent to-day, there was too much mist about; and he liked to see them; for whenever he saw them he began to think of his sister Eliza, and he liked to think of her—­she was his favourite sister.  They were nearly the same age, and had played together; and his eyes dwelt in memory on the dark corner under the stairs where they used to play.  He could even see their toys through the years, and the tall clock which used to tell them that it was time to put them aside.  Eliza was only eighteen months older than he; they were the red-haired ones, and though they were as different in mind as it was possible to be, he seemed nearer Eliza than anyone else.  In what this affinity consisted he couldn’t say, but he had always felt himself of the same flesh and blood.  Neither his father nor mother had inspired this sense of affinity; and his sister Mary and his brothers seemed to him merely people whom he had known always—­not more than that; whereas Eliza was quite different, and perhaps it was this very mutuality, which he could not define, that had decided their vocations.

No doubt there is a moment in every man’s life when something happens to turn him into the road which he is destined to follow; for all that it would be superficial to think that the fate of one’s life is dependent upon accident.  The accident that turns one into the road is only the means which Providence takes to procure the working out of certain ends.  Accidents are many:  life is as full of accidents as a fire is full of sparks, and any spark is enough to set fire to the train.  The train escapes a thousand, but at last a spark lights it, and this spark always seems to us the only one that could have done it.  We cannot imagine how the same result could