Having written them out he lay back on the lumpy pillow, murmuring them again.  The lumps of knotted flock under his head reminded him of the lumps of knotted horsehair in the sofa of her parlour on which he used to sit, smiling or serious, asking himself why he had come, displeased with her and with himself, confounded by the print of the Sacred Heart above the untenanted sideboard.  He saw her approach him in a lull of the talk and beg him to sing one of his curious songs.  Then he saw himself sitting at the old piano, striking chords softly from its speckled keys and singing, amid the talk which had risen again in the room, to her who leaned beside the mantelpiece a dainty song of the Elizabethans, a sad and sweet loth to depart, the victory chant of Agincourt, the happy air of Greensleeves.  While he sang and she listened, or feigned to listen, his heart was at rest but when the quaint old songs had ended and he heard again the voices in the room he remembered his own sarcasm:  the house where young men are called by their christian names a little too soon.

At certain instants her eyes seemed about to trust him but he had waited in vain.  She passed now dancing lightly across his memory as she had been that night at the carnival ball, her white dress a little lifted, a white spray nodding in her hair.  She danced lightly in the round.  She was dancing towards him and, as she came, her eyes were a little averted and a faint glow was on her cheek.  At the pause in the chain of hands her hand had lain in his an instant, a soft merchandise.

—­You are a great stranger now.

—­Yes.  I was born to be a monk.

—­I am afraid you are a heretic.

—­Are you much afraid?

For answer she had danced away from him along the chain of hands, dancing lightly and discreetly, giving herself to none.  The white spray nodded to her dancing and when she was in shadow the glow was deeper on her cheek.

A monk!  His own image started forth a profaner of the cloister, a heretic franciscan, willing and willing not to serve, spinning like Gherardino da Borgo San Donnino, a lithe web of sophistry and whispering in her ear.

No, it was not his image.  It was like the image of the young priest in whose company he had seen her last, looking at him out of dove’s eyes, toying with the pages of her Irish phrase-book.

—­Yes, yes, the ladies are coming round to us.  I can see it every day.  The ladies are with us.  The best helpers the language has.

—­And the church, Father Moran?

—­The church too.  Coming round too.  The work is going ahead there too. 
Don’t fret about the church.

Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain.  He had done well not to salute her on the steps of the library!  He had done well to leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy with a church which was the scullery-maid of christendom.