know what
it was. He was looking up so intently, so still, and he saw her kick the
ball and perhaps he could see the bright steel buckles of her shoes if
she swung them like that thoughtfully with the toes down. She was glad
that something told her to put on the transparent stockings thinking
Reggy Wylie might be out but that was far away. Here was that of which
she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on
her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he
was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him,
her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had
suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had
been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a
protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved
her. There were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm. She was a
womanly woman not like other flighty girls unfeminine he had known,
those cyclists showing off what they hadn't got and she just yearned to
know all, to forgive all if she could make him fall in love with her,
make him forget the memory of the past. Then mayhap he would embrace her
gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her,
his ownest girlie, for herself alone.

Refuge of sinners. Comfortress of the afflicted. _Ora pro nobis_. Well
has it been said that whosoever prays to her with faith and constancy
can never be lost or cast away: and fitly is she too a haven of refuge
for the afflicted because of the seven dolours which transpierced
her own heart. Gerty could picture the whole scene in the church, the
stained glass windows lighted up, the candles, the flowers and the blue
banners of the blessed Virgin's sodality and Father Conroy was helping
Canon O'Hanlon at the altar, carrying things in and out with his eyes
cast down. He looked almost a saint and his confessionbox was so quiet
and clean and dark and his hands were just like white wax and if ever
she became a Dominican nun in their white habit perhaps he might come to
the convent for the novena of Saint Dominic. He told her that time when
she told him about that in confession, crimsoning up to the roots of her
hair for fear he could see, not to be troubled because that was only the
voice of nature and we were all subject to nature's laws, he said, in
this life and that that was no sin because that came from the nature of
woman in