Mrs. Mangan, who had been too much harassed by Hannah’s failure to decode her signals, to attend, heard the name only, and said lovingly: 

“The dear boy!  How nice for him and you to meet so far away from home, Father!”

Barty’s satisfaction at his mother’s unexpected comment took the form of kicking his sister, heavily.  Tishy, who sang in the chapel choir, and was at this time inclined to regard herself as a pillar of the Church, returned the kick with a viciousness that indicated a hostile point of view, and said loftily: 

“But to think they’d ask him!  The English are very lax.  Don’t you think so, Father?”

Dr. Mangan laughed apologetically.

“Well, it’s a wonder that a party of sheep would let a poor goat into their fold at all!” he said, in a voice that asked for forgiveness for the erring goat.  “I suppose the young ladies got him in a corner, and ’twas hard for him to refuse.  You’d hardly blame him for that!”

Father Greer looked bleakly down his nose and said nothing.

Barty scowled, considering that his hero stood in no need of apology.  Dr. Mangan continued his endeavour to save the situation.

“But there’s no understanding of Protestants!” he resumed, good-humouredly; “I met an old fellow on the train th’ other day, old William Henderson of Glen Brickeen, and he was telling me of a row he had with his clergyman, the Reverend Wilson.  ‘Oh,’ says he, ’I gave up going to church on the head of it!’ ’And isn’t that a great sin for you,’ says I, ‘to give up going to church?’ ‘Oh,’ says he, ’I explain that to God every Saturday.  He understands well what Mr. Wilson done to me, and why I wouldn’t go to church as long as he was in it.’  ‘Maybe,’ said I, funning him, ’some day he might be before you in Heaven with his story, and what’ll you do then?’ ‘Oh,’ said he, I’ll make out a place for myself, never fear!  There’s places of all sorts in it!’ says he.  ’I suppose it’s the many mansions you’re thinking of!’ said I.  ’You think the poor Roman Catholics don’t know their Bibles, but I know that much!’”

“Well, Francis,” said Mrs. Mangan, admiringly, “I never knew you that you’d be without an answer, no matter what anyone’d say to you!  ’Many mansions,’ says you!  I declare I’d never have thought of that!  Father, wouldn’t you say he answered him well!”

Father Greer, having made his point, smiled indulgently, and, as he was deeply involved in a mouthful of tough goose, the smile, blended with the act of mastication, made him look more than ever like a fox, a fox in a trap, gnashing at his captors.

“I always knew the Doctor could be trusted to ’give a knave an answer,’ as Shakespeare says,” he said, when the power of speech was restored to him; “I’m often surprised at the liberty, I might almost say the licence, that is met with in Protestants in connection with their religion.  Take the case of young Mr. Coppinger that I was speaking of.  That was a melancholy instance of evil communications corrupting good manners.  I may say that I regard with anxiety a too great freedom, what I may call an unrestrained intercourse, between members of the two churches—­that is, indeed, if I am justified in describing as a church that which I have heard stigmatised as ’a fortuitous concourse of atheistic atoms’!”