Meantime he had to pass a man who was breaking stones in a ditch by the roadside.  The hard cracks of the hammer were resounding on the still air.  The man looked up from his work as the Rector came along; the grey face of the stone-breaker had a melancholy familiarity for him.  The Rector had an impulse—­it was seldom he had one.  He stood in the centre of the road.  The Ne Temere decree went from his mind.

“Good-day, my man,” he said, feeling that he had made another concession, and that it would be futile as all the others.

“Good-day, sir,” the stone-breaker made answer, hitching himself upon the sack he had put under his haunches, like one very ready for a conversation.

There was a pause.  The Rector did not know very well how to continue.  He should, he knew, speak with some sense of colloquialism if he was to get on with this stonebreaker, a person for whom he had a certain removed sympathy.  The manner of these people’s speech was really a part of the grievances of the Rector.  Their conversation, he often secretly assured himself, was peppered with Romish propaganda.  But the Rector made another concession.

“It’s a fine day, thank God,” he said.  He spoke like one who was delivering a message in an unfamiliar language.  “Thank God” was local, and might lend itself to an interpretation that could not be approved.  But the Rector imported something into the words that was a protection, something that was of the pulpit, that held a solemnity in its pessimism.

“A fine day, indeed, glory be to God!” the stonebreaker made answer.  There was a freshness in his expression, a cheerfulness in the prayer, that made of it an optimism.

The Rector was so conscious of the contrast that it gave him pause again.  The peach-like colourings on the cheeks brightened, for a suspicion occurred to him.  Could the fellow have meant anything?  Had he deliberately set up an optimistic Deity in opposition to the pessimistic Deity of the Rector?  The Rector hitched up the white cuffs under his dark sleeves, swung his umbrella, and resumed his way, his lips puckered, a little feverish agitation seizing him.

“A strange, down-hearted kind of a man,” the stonebreaker said to himself, as he reached out for a lump of lime-stone and raised his hammer.  A redbreast, perched on an old thorn bush, looking out on the scene with curious eyes, stretched his wing and his leg, as much as to say, “Ah, well,” sharpened his beak on a twig, and dropped into the ditch to pick up such gifts as the good earth yielded.

The Rector walked along the road pensive, but steadfast, his eyes upon the alien hills, his mind travelling over ridges of problems that never afforded the gleam of solution.  He heard a shout of a laugh.  Above the local accents that held a cadence of the Gaelic speech he heard the sharp clipping Northern accent of his own gardener and general factotum.  He had brought the man with him when he first came to Connacht, half as a mild form of colonisation, half through a suspicion of local honesty.  He now saw the man’s shaggy head over the Rectory garden wall, and outside it were the peasants.