She was grateful to the exigencies of the Service which made it absolutely necessary for Terry to be back in barracks next day. He had gone off after breakfast with Major Evelyn and Mr. Earnshaw, forbidding her to come to see him off. Sir Shawn, who was High Sheriff for the year and had to be in the county town for the opening of the Assizes, took the party to the station on his way. She was left with the morning on her hands.
How to use it? Oh, she had been impatient for them to be gone! The hope which had seemed so frail in the night had strengthened and failed, strengthened and failed many times since. This morning it was strong within her. It was founded on so little. Terry had called Terence Comerford hard names last night. A villain. She did not think Terence was a villain. He had been a kindly, affectionate fellow, very quick to be angry about a cruelty to any helpless thing. A good heart: oh, yes, Terence had had a good heart: but, even to her had come the dreary knowledge that good-hearted people can be very cruel in their sins.
She had looked at it from many points of view. Supposing Terence had meant to marry the girl and been prevented by his sudden death! Something came into her mind, dreary and terrible. "The way to Hell is paved with good intentions." Poor Terence, who had laid this coil for their feet, tangling their lives and happiness in the meshes of his passion, had he been paving Hell, just paving Hell, with good intentions never to be realized?
Early as they had started she had found time to speak to her husband about the possibility of there having been a marriage. He had found her beside his bed full-dressed when he opened his eyes on the grey morning.
"Shawn," she had said, "Could Terence have married Bridyeen Sweeney?"
The maze of sleep was still in his eyes. For a moment he stared at her as though she had given him a new idea. Then he turned away fretfully.
"No," he said, "no. Put that out of your head. If it was so would he have let me go on suffering as I did? It was the whiskey was at the root of the trouble. He would never have spoken to me as he did if it had not been for the whiskey."
She passed over the irrelevancy. Shawn was not yet all awake.
"Would he have righted her if he had lived, do you think, Shawn?"
"My God, Mary, how can I tell? Why do you torture me with such senseless questions? You know how that old tragedy has power to upset me.