that Nora’s health might not have withstood the strain of trudging from street to street, teaching the piano at two shillings an hour, returning home late at night to a poky little lodging, eating any food a landlady might choose to give her.  As a music teacher she would have had great difficulty in supporting herself and her baby, and it pleased him to imagine the child as very like her mother; and returning to the house, he added this paragraph: 

’I was interrupted while writing this letter by a sudden darkening of the light, and when I went to the window the sky seemed to have sunk close to the earth, and there was a dreadful silence underneath it.  I was driven back by a flash of lightning, and the thunder was terrifying.  A most extraordinary storm lasting for no more than an hour, if that, and then dispersing into a fine evening.  It was a pleasure to see the change—­the lake shrouded in mist, with ducks talking softly in the reeds, and swallows high up, advancing in groups like dancers on a background of dappled clouds.

’I have come back to my letter to ask if you would like me to go to see your baby?  Father O’Grady and I will go together if I go to London, and I will write to you about it.  You will be glad, no doubt, to hear that the child is going on well.

’Very sincerely yours,

‘OLIVER GOGARTY.’

From Father Oliver Gogarty to Miss Nora Glynn.

’GARRANARD, BOHOLA,

’September 4, 19—.

’Forgive me, my dear friend, but I am compelled to write to apologize for the introduction of my troubles of conscience and my anxiety for your spiritual welfare into my last letter.  You found a way out of difficulties—­difficulties into which I plunged you.  But we will say no more on that point:  enough has been said.  You have created a life for yourself.  You have shown yourself to be a strong woman in more ways than one, and are entitled to judge whether your work and the ideas you live among are likely to prove prejudicial to your faith and morals.  By a virtue of forgiveness which I admire and thank you for, you write telling me of the literary work you are engaged upon.  If I had thought before writing the letter I am now apologizing for, I could not have failed to see that you write to me because you would relieve my loneliness as far as you are able.  But I did not think:  I yielded to my mood, and see now that my letters are disgracefully egotistical, and very often absurd; for have I not begged of you to remember that since God will hold me responsible for your soul, it would be well that you should live a life of virtue and renunciation, so that I shall be saved the humiliation of looking down from above upon you in hell?