Hyacinth had three months’ work to do before he actually left Mr. Quinn’s employment. He knew that at the end of that time he would be left absolutely without income, and that it was necessary for him to look out for some other situation. He reckoned up the remains of his original capital, and found himself with little more than a hundred pounds to fall back upon. Yet he did nothing. From time to time he bestirred himself, pondered the newspaper advertisements of vacant situations, and mentally resolved to commence his search at once. Always some excuse offered itself to justify putting the unpleasant business off, and he allowed himself to slip back into the quiet routine of life as if no catastrophe threatened him. He was, indeed, far more troubled about the Quinns’ future than his own, and when, at the end of April, Canon Beecher returned from Dublin with the news that he had secured the secretaryship of the Church of Ireland Scriptural Schools Society for Mr. Quinn, Hyacinth felt that his mind was relieved of a great anxiety. That no such post had been discovered for him did not cost him a thought. In spite of his spasmodic efforts to goad himself into a condition of reasonable anxiety for his future, there remained half consciously present in his mind a conviction that somehow a way of getting sufficient food and clothes would offer itself in due time.

The conviction was justified by the event. It was on Saturday evening that the Canon returned with his good news, and on Sunday morning Hyacinth received a letter from Miss Goold.

‘You have no doubt heard,’ she wrote, ‘that we have got a new editor for the Croppy—Patrick O’Dwyer, Mary’s brother. Of course, you remember Mary and her unpoetical hysterics the morning after the Rotunda meeting. The new editor is a splendid man. He has been on the staff of a New York paper for the last five years, and thoroughly understands the whole business. But that’s not the best of him. He hates England worse than I do. I’m only a child beside him, bursting out into fits of temper now and then, and cooling off again. He hates steadily, quietly, and intensely. But even that is not all that is to be said. He has got brains—brains enough, my dear Hyacinth, to make fools of you and me every day and all day long. He has devised a new policy for Ireland. The plan is simplicity itself, like all really great plans, and it must succeed. I won’t go into it now, because I want you to come up to Dublin and see O’Dwyer. He tells me that he needs somebody else besides himself on the staff of the Croppy, which, by the way, is to be enlarged and improved. He wants a man who can write a column a week in Irish, as well as an article now and then in good strong plain English. I suggested your name to him, and showed him some of the articles you had written. He was greatly pleased with the one about O’Dowd’s cheap patriotism, and liked one or two of the others. He just asked one question about you: “Does Mr. Conneally hate England and the Empire, and everything English, from the Parliament to the police barrack? It is this hatred which must animate the work.” I said I thought you did. I told him how you had volunteered to fight for the Boers, and about the day you nearly killed that blackguard Shea. He seemed to think that was good enough, and asked me to write to you on the subject. We can’t offer you a big salary. The editor himself is only to get a hundred pounds a year for the present, and I am guaranteeing another hundred for you. I am confident that I shan’t have to pay it for more than six months. The paper is sure to go as it never went before, and in a few years we shall be able to treble O’Dwyer’s salary and double yours. Nothing like such a chance has ever offered itself in Irish history before. Everything goes to show that this is our opportunity. England is weaker than she has been for centuries, is clinging desperately to the last tatters of her old prestige. She hasn’t a single statesman capable of thinking or acting vigorously. Her Parliament is the laughingstock of Europe. Her Irish policy may be summed up in four words—intrigue with the Vatican. In Ireland the power of the faithful garrison is gone. The Protestants in the North are sick of being fooled by one English party after another. The landlords, or what’s left of them, are beginning to discover that they have been bought and sold. The Bishops, England’s last line of defence, are overreaching themselves, and we are within measurable distance of the day when the Church will be put into her proper place. There is not so much as a shoneen publican in a country town left who believes in the ranting of O’Rourke and his litter of blind whelps. Ireland is simply crying out for light and leading, and the Croppy is going to give both. You always wanted to serve Ireland. Now I am offering you the chance. I don’t say you ought to thank me, though you will thank me to the day of your death. I don’t say that you have an opportunity of becoming a great man. I know you, and I know a better way of making sure of you than that. I say to you, Hyacinth Conneally, that we want you—just you and nobody else. Ireland wants you.’

The letter, especially the last part of it, was sufficiently ridiculous to have moved Hyacinth to a smile. But it did no such thing. On the contrary, its rhetoric excited and touched him. The flattery of the final sentences elated him. The absurdity of the idea that Ireland needed him, a fifth-rate office clerk, an out-of-work commercial traveller who had failed to sell blankets and flannels, did not strike him at all. The figure of Augusta Goold rose to his mind. She flashed before him, an Apocalyptic angel, splended and terrible, trumpet-calling him to the last great fight. He forgot in an instant the Quinns and their trouble. The years of quietness in Ballymoy, the daily intercourse with gentle people, the atmosphere of the religion in which he had lived, fell away from him suddenly.

He sat absorbed in an ecstasy of joyful excitement until the jangling of Canon Beecher’s church bell recalled him to common life again. It speaks for the strength of the habits he had formed in Ballymoy that he rose without hesitation and went to take his part in the morning service.

He sat down as usual beside Marion Beecher and her harmonium. He listened to her playing until her father entered. He found himself gazing at her when she stood up for the opening words of the service. He felt himself strangely affected by the gentleness of her face and the slender beauty of her form. When she knelt down he could not take his eyes off her. There came over him an inexplicable softening, a relaxation of the tense excitement of the morning. He thought of her kneeling there in the faded shabby church Sunday after Sunday for years and years, when he was working at hot pressure far away. He knew just how her eyes would look calmly, trustfully up to the God she spoke to; how her soul would grow in gentleness; how love would be the very atmosphere around her. And all the while he would struggle and fight, with no inspiration except a bitter hate. Suddenly there came on him a feeling that he could not leave her. The very thought of separation was a fierce pain. A desire of her seized on him like uncontrollable physical hunger. Wherever he might be, whatever life might have in store for him, he knew that his heart would go back to her restlessly, and remain unsatisfied without her. He understood that he loved her. Canon Beecher’s voice came to him as if from an immense distance:

‘O God, mak............