As he listened to these words between her sobs, there rushed in upon him full realization of all her goodness and the contrast of two pictures her words had called to his mind.... There was he by her side, her head upon his shoulder in that lonely cottage in Donegal, their young lives lighting the cold, bare place around them.... And then the other picture of himself bent low over his dirty, thumb-greased books in that abominable street up and down which a cart was always lumbering. All the torture of this driving him to Doyle's pub at the corner, and afterwards along some squalid street of ill-fame with a few more drunken medical students.
He was glad to be with her again. They met very often during his first month at his uncle's house, in dark spots along the valley road and The Road of the Dead. Then he began to notice a curious reserve springing up between them. She was becoming mysterious while at the same time remaining acutely present in his life.
One morning she had asked him if he intended to remain long in the valley, and he had not known how to reply to her. Another time she had asked him if he was going to retire altogether from the study of medicine, and with what did he intend to occupy himself now? And, upon a certain occasion, she had almost asked him was it the intention of his uncle to leave him the grand farm and the lovely house among the trees?
These were vexatious questions and so different from any part of the talk they used to have here in the valley last summer or at the cottage in Donegal. Her feeling of surrender in his presence had been replaced by a sense of possession which seemed the death of all that kindling of her heart. Then it had happened that, despite the encouragement of his uncle, a shadow had fallen upon his love-affair with Rebecca Kerr.... He was growing tired of his idle existence in the valley. Very slowly he was beginning to see life from a new angle. He was disgusted with himself and with the mess he had made of things in Dublin. He could not say whether it was her talk with him that had shamed him into thinking about it, but he felt again like making something of himself away from this mean place. Once or twice he wondered whether it was because he wanted to get away from her. Somehow his uncle and himself were the only people who seemed directly concerned in the matter. His uncle was a very decent man, and he felt that he could not presume on his hospitality any longer.
Mr. Shannon took off his spectacles and laid by the Irish Times. There was an intimate bond between the man and his paper. He always considered it as hitting off his own opinions to a nicety upon any subject under the sun. This always after he had read the leaders which dealt with these subjects. It afforded a contribution to his thought and ideas out of which he spoke with a surer word.
Old Susan Hennessy came into the room with some letters that Farrell McGuinness was after leaving. She hobbled in, a hunched, decrepit woman, now in the concluding stages of her long life as housekeeper to the Shannons, and put the letters into her master's hand.... Then she lingered, quite unnecessarily, about the breakfast-table. Her toothless gums were stripping as words began to struggle into her mouth.... Mr. Shannon took notice of her. This was her usual behavior when she had anything of uncommon interest to say.
"Well, what is it now?" said Mr. Shannon, not without some weariness in his tones, for he expected only to hear some poor piece of local gossip.
"It's how Farrell McGuinness is after telling me, sir, that John Brennan is home."
"Is that a fact?"
"And Farrell says that by the looks on the outside of a certain letter that came to Mrs. Brennan th'other day it is what he is after being expelled."