"He is brave, and he was always kind. He came to me before he left the valley—for he had trouble—and said to me: 'Father, I am going away, and to what place is far from me to know, but wherever it is, I'll live a life that's fit for men, and not like a loafer on God's world;' and he gave me money for masses to be said—for the dead."
The girl put out her hand. "Hush! hush!" she said. "Let me think. Masses for the dead…. What dead? Not for me; he thought me dead long, long ago."
"No; not for you," was the slow reply.
She noticed his hesitation, and said: "Speak. I know that there is sorrow on him. Someone—someone—he loved?"
"Someone he loved," was the reply.
"And she died?" The priest bowed his head.
"She was his wife—Shon's wife?" and Mary Callen could not hide from her words the hurt she felt.
"I married her to him, but yet she was not his wife." There was a keen distress in the girl's voice. "Father, tell me, tell me what you mean."
"Hush, and I will tell you all. He married her, thinking, and she thinking, that she was a widowed woman. But her husband came back. A terrible thing happened. The woman believing, at a painful time, that he who came back was about to take Shon's life, fired at him, and wounded him, and then killed herself."
Mary Callen raised herself upon her elbow, and looked at the priest in piteous bewilderment. "It is dreadful," she said. . . . "Poor woman! . . . And he had forgotten—forgotten me. I was dead to him, and am dead to him now. There's nothing left but to draw the cold sheet of the grave over me. Better for me if I had never come—if I had never come, and instead were lyin' by his father and mother beneath the rowan."