“You can learn twelve of the ‘I wills’ of the Psalms for next Sunday, Tierney,” said Uncle Charles’ voice in the hall, “and three more of the ‘Plain Reasons against joining the Church of Rome.’”
Uncle Charles opened the drawing-room door as he made the concluding charge, and met Mr. Glasgow in the act of taking leave of his niece.
When Slaney went up to her room that night she sat for a long time by the fire, with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. There was a little table by her. On it were an old-fashioned desk, a good many books, and, half-emerging from the paper in which it had been wrapped, a number of the Fortnightly Review. She sat for a long time, and sometimes in the silence of the house the beating of her heart was like a voice in her ears, telling her irrepressibly of her own weakness and strength, of depths of herself hitherto unknown. Her pure and ardent nature was awakening out of narrowness, her clear intellect scaled all possibilities like a strong climber.
As if she had yielded to herself for too long, she sat up at length, and after a moment, took up the Fortnightly Review, and began to turn its pages over—Glasgow had brought it to her that afternoon—and she searched for the article that he had commended. Cold logic and relentless statistics would inflict composure, would steady her down to the level of sleep.
Two of the pages fell apart where a sheet of paper had been thrust in; she was abruptly confronted by a letter in a large, heavy handwriting. The eye is quicker than the will. Before she snatched her eyes away she had taken in its half-a-dozen lines. For some moments she sat perfectly still, while the blood came with a rush to her cheeks and forehead. Then she crumpled up the letter and threw it into the fire.
CHAPTER V
The frost that had sharpened the moon and armoured the pools, held its ground for but one night. The voice of the south moaned in the casements, a grey, strong rain followed it, and on the morning of the second day a clean wind blew across the soaked fields, and the sun came forth in a sky of new-born blue.
Tom Quin’s red-haired sister stood at the door of her house, and looked across the furzy uplands to where a long wood climbed and sank on a spur of Cahirdreen hill. Her hair seemed on fire in the sunshine, and the pupils of her light eyes were contracted to pin points by the glare from the white-washed lintel.
“He’s coming,” she said, turning back in to the house, where her mother was sitting on a stool by the fire, with a cup of tea in her hand, and a bare-legged grandchild squatting beside her on the warm hearthstone. Since her bereavement, the widow Quin breakfasted fitfully by half-cupfuls at intervals during the morning, and did not sit at the table.