ce in this wayside countryside. His
mind worked its way down through all the stages of complaint until it
arrived at the _Ne Temere_ decree. The lips of the Rector no longer
formed half-spoken words; they became two straight, tight little thin
lines across the teeth. They would remain that way all the afternoon,
held in position while he read the letters in the _Irish Times_. He
would give himself up to thoughts of politics, of the deeds of wicked
men, of the transactions that go on within and without governments,
doping his mind with the drug of class opiates until it was time to go
to bed.

Meantime he had to pass a man who was breaking stones in a ditch by the
roadside. The hard cracks of the hammer were resounding on the still
air. The man looked up from his work as the Rector came along; the grey
face of the stone-breaker had a melancholy familiarity for him. The
Rector had an impulse--it was seldom he had one. He stood in the centre
of the road. The _Ne Temere_ decree went from his mind.

"Good-day, my man," he said, feeling that he had made another
concession, and that it would be futile as all the others.

"Good-day, sir," the stone-breaker made answer, hitching himself upon
the sack he had put under his haunches, like one very ready for a
conversation.

There was a pause. The Rector did not know very well how to continue. He
should, he knew, speak with some sense of colloquialism if he was to get
on with this stonebreaker, a person for whom he had a certain removed
sympathy. The manner of these people's speech was really a part of the
grievances of the Rector. Their conversation, he often secretly assured
himself, was peppered with Romish propaganda. But the Rector made
another concession.

"It's a fine day, thank God," he said. He spoke like one who was
delivering a message in an unfamiliar language. "Thank God" was local,
and might lend itself to an interpretation that could not be approved.
But the Rector imported something into the words that was a protection,
something that was of the pulpit, that held a solemnity in its
pessimism.

"A fine day, indeed, glory be to God!" the stonebreaker made answer.
There was a freshness in his expression, a cheerfulness in the prayer,
that made of it an optimism.

The Rector was so conscious of the contrast that it gave him pause
again. The peach-like colourings on the cheeks brightened, for a
suspicion occurred to him. Could the fellow have meant anything? Had