Christian, far away in the County Limerick, received the letter with her early cup of tea, and, as she read it, felt her soul disquieted within her.  The conjunction of the stars of Love and Politics presaged, she felt, disaster—­as if the question of religion had not been complicating enough!  Even had her gift of envisaging a situation by the light of reason failed her, that spiritual aneroid, which, sensitive to soul-pressure, warned her intuitively of coming joy or sorrow, ill luck or good fortune, had fallen from set fair to stormy.  She had gone to sleep with sunshine in her heart; she awoke in clouds, dark and threatening.  She read Larry’s letter, and knew that the foreboding would come true.

It is probable that no human being was ever less the prey of intuitions or presentiments than was young Mr. Coppinger, as he bicycled lightly into Cluhir along the solitary steam-rolled road of the district, a typical effort of Irish civilisation, initiated by Dr. Mangan, that had proposed to link Cluhir with the outer world, but had died, like a worn-out tramp, at the end of a few faltering miles, on the steps of the work-house hospital at Riverstown.  The road ran along the bank of the great river, with nothing save a low fence and a footpath between it and the water.  The river was still and gleaming.  Masses of dove-coloured cloud, with touches of silver-saffron, where their lining showed through, draped the wide sky, in over-lapping folds.  The planes of distance up the broad valley were graduated in tone by a succession of screens of luminous vapour that parcelled out the landscape, taking away all colour save that bestowed by the transparent golden grey of the mist.  The roofs of Cluhir made a dark profile in the middle distance, the lower part of the houses hidden in the steaming mist, and the beautiful outline of the twin crests of Carrigaholt was like a golden shadow in the sky above them.  The spire and the tower of the two churches of Cluhir, rose on either side of the pale radiance of the river, with the slender arch of the bridge joining them, as if to show in allegory their inherent oneness, their joint access to the water of life.  Religion counted for but little with Larry in those days, yet as the wonder of beauty sank into his soul, that was ever thirsty for beauty, the thought of what it would mean for Ireland if the symbol of the linking bridge had its counterpart in reality sprang into his eager mind.  Then he thought of himself and Christian, and knew that religion could never come between him and her, and, as the close-followed thought of what these last days had brought, rose in his mind, the wonder of it overwhelmed him.  He told himself that the only possible explanation of her caring for such as he, was that Narcissus-like, she had seen her own image reflected in his heart, and had fallen in love with it.  The fancy attracted him; he rode on, his mind set on a sonnet that should fitly enshrine the thought, and politics and religion, symbols and ideals, faded, as the stars go out when the sun comes.