ork?'

'There's no work doing now to speak of, your reverence.'

The three of them together just managed to remove a fallen tree, which
seemed the most serious obstacle, and the countryman said once they were
over the top of the hill they would be all right; the road wasn't so bad
after that.

Half a mile further on Father Oliver found himself in sight of the main
road, and of the cottage that his sister Mary had lived in before she
joined Eliza in the convent.

To have persuaded Mary to take this step proved Eliza's superiority
more completely than anything else she had done, so Father Oliver often
said, adding that he didn't know what mightn't have happened to poor
Mary if she had remained in the world. For her life up to the time she
entered the convent was little else than a series of failures. She was a
shop-assistant, but standing behind the counter gave her varicose veins;
and she went to Dublin as nursery-governess. Father Oliver had heard of
musical studies: she used to play the guitar. But the instrument was not
popular in Dublin, so she gave it up, and returned to Tinnick with the
intention of starting a rabbit and poultry farm. Who put this idea into
her head was her secret, and when he received Eliza's letter telling him
of this last experiment, he remembered throwing up his hands. Of course,
it could only end in failure, in a loss of money; and when he read that
she was going to take the pretty cottage on the road to Tinnick, he had
become suddenly sad.

'Why should she have selected that cottage, the only pretty one in the
county? Wouldn't any other do just as well for her foolish experiment?'

VI

The flowered cottage on the road to Tinnick stood in the midst of trees,
on a knoll some few feet above the roadway, and Father Oliver, when he
was a boy, often walked out by himself from Tinnick to see the
hollyhocks and the sunflowers; they overtopped the palings, the
sunflowers looking like saucy country girls and the hollyhocks like
grand ladies, delicate and refined, in pink muslin dresses. He used to
stand by the gate looking into the garden, delighted by its luxuriance,
for there were clumps of sweet pea and beds of red carnations and roses
everywhere, and he always remembered the violets and pansies he saw
before he went away to Maynooth. He never remembered seeing the garden
in bloom again. He was seven years at Maynooth, and when he came home
for his vacations it was too late or too ea