In his desire to obey her he was still strong, but, this morning, as he walked along to Garradrimna he was possessed by a certain feeling of annoyance which seemed to strain the bond that stretched between them.
In the chapel he knelt beside Charlie Clarke, like the voteens around them, with a lifeless acquiescence in the ceremony. He was here not because his heart was here, but merely because his mother had wished it. When his lips moved, in mechanical mimicry of the priest, he felt that the way of the hypocrite must be hard and lonely.
When he came out, upon the road he was confused to find himself face to face with Rebecca Kerr. It seemed a trick of coincidence that he should meet her now, for it had never happened on any other morning. Then he suddenly remembered how his mother had kept him late from "eight o'clock" by her talk of the concert, and it was now Miss Kerr's school-going time.... She smiled and spoke to him.
She looked handsome as she moved there along the road from the house of Sergeant McGoldrick to the Girls' School of Tullahanogue. She was in harmony with the beauty of the morning. There had been a dull pain upon his mind since he had last seen her, but already it was gone.
Although the concert might appear as the immediate subject to which their minds would turn, this was not so. They began to talk of places and things away from Garradrimna.
She spun for his amusement many little yarns of the nuns who conducted the college where she had been trained. He told her stories of the priests who taught in the English college where he was being educated for the priesthood. They enlarged upon the peculiarities of monastic establishments.
"And you're going to be a priest?" she said, looking up into his face suddenly with dancing eyes.
Such a question had never before been put to him in exactly this way.
"I am.... At least, I think so.... Oh, yes!" he faltered.
She laughed in a ringing, musical way that seemed to hold just the faintest trace of mockery in its tones, but it seemed, next instant, to be only by way of preface to another conventual tale which she proceeded to tell.