The thought of it frightened him, frightened him far worse than the thought of death, and the thought of death seemed to him one of the most undesirable of all thoughts, except when he connected it with a romantic issue. Thus, he would have thought it delightful to die for his country, though not quite clear as to what he meant by this; for no one seemed to know what a country was. .. The Intermediate Education Board had succeeded in driving the possibility of discovering any real meaning in the word patriotism out of his mind: to ask an Irish boy to regard England as his country was to demand of him the impossible, but, at the same time, to demonstrate that he had no country of his own. He thought that when he grew up he might travel all over the world in search of a country that he might make his own, and then, if occasion should arise, die for it. . . Meanwhile his wish to die for his country was a mere form of piety impossible to put in practice.

Nearer home was the other greater and more romantic possibility, that of dying for his love. Ere he had yet learnt to swim he had saved Caroline Brady from drowning: repeatedly he had done the same for Josephine O'Meagher, and more than once for Barbara Burns, but only from the high running seas of his conceit, so they never thanked him. To do him justice, he was too humane to wish them in peril that he might make sure whether he had the courage to rescue them or not: he forgot that he had not the strength; for although since his bicycle accident he had lost some of his activity, he swam pretty well, yet an effort to support any of these comparatively large ladies in the water would not have succeeded.

On the other hand, how delicious to die with them. . . . With any one of them to die with all of them together he recognised as something a little pretentious, what was the word, unchivalrous. The

knights of Christian chivalry had but one lady love at tragic moments: he was less certain of the custom of the Paynim palladins. West was west for him, and he stuck to the Christian ideal, still, to die with Josephine would be to enter heaven: failing that, to die with Caroline would be exquisitely mysterious to die with Barbara would be vastly interesting, though, he feared, impossible, because of her snobbery. . . . She could not forget that she was the granddaughter of a baronet, and yet there was Caroline Brady working in the same showroom with a baronet's daughter, Miss Smith-Pink. He wondered if Miss Smith-Pink were any relation of the Mr Porphyro Smith-Pink who had recited 'Who Fears to Speak of Ninety-Eight?' the first night Adam had visited the Six Muses Club. That Mr Smith-Pink was a Sinn Feiner, he believed. . . . It was ignorant of Caroline Brady to suppose that Sinn Feiners were worse than anarchists. Anarchists were the dregs of society, except Mr Behre, who called himself a philosophical anarchist: philosophical anarchists were not infrequently princes, like Prince Kropotkin, whose books Mr Macarthy had, and told Adam that he ought to read; but Adam could not read economics. He wished he knew, without the trouble of reading them, what was the difference between a philosophical anarchist and the common variety; he wondered if it were possible that the philosophical anarchists were people who would not do what they thought they ought to do, and the other anarchists people who did what they thought they ought not. He knew, anyhow, that the word anarchist meant one who was against the law, but his experience of life showed him that everybody was against the law when he found it interfered with him. The Government itself that made the law made no attempt to keep it; as for the police, they seemed to him to do as they liked. . . . There was Father Tudor again: everyone agreed that he had no right to do as he did, yet because he was a

strong man no-one had the courage to make him stop it.

With such thoughts chasing through his brain, Adam lived through the week before Whit Monday. He longed passionately for that day, and yet there was something innocent in it all, even in the very passion. Side by side with his longing to enjoy his love went a counting and recounting of the years that separated him from the possibility of marriage. On the very Saturday morning it occurred to him that he would go. to confession once again to Father Ignatius Steele. He would, after all, seek his advice as to how he might purge his soul of any shade of sensuality in his thought of Caroline Brady.

At three o'clock down Gardiner Street he went, and up the church steps, making reverently this time a sign of the cross with the holy water in the font, and praying a little while before the high altar ere he sought the Ignatian chapel. As he approached Father Steele's box, he saw an old lady come out, and a grey-haired man, whom he thought he remembered to have seen there before, go in. Only one other was waiting at that side of the box, so there Adam knelt down to make his final preparation. He found himself reviewing not only the past weeks but his whole life; for he was determined to say all frankly to Father Steele that could throw light upon the present. And, thinking of how he had first come to meet Caroline Brady in that cab outside the Mater Misericordiæ Hospital, he thought of that other meeting outside the Gresham Hotel which had driven him into hospital. As he was thinking of this, visualising the horror of that meeting, he heard the shutter of the box near him click, and the old man's voice muttering his sins. It seemed to Adam that it was a whining tale, the whine of a whipped mongrel. Adam felt it uncanny that a man should be so sorry as all that even for his sins, and wondered what vileness the old man was telling. After a long

while the slide clicked again, the door opened, and the old man came out.

Adam knew it was uncharitable to look at him, but could not resist the temptation, and there he saw his face, drawn with a caitiff's repentance, struggling against the easier line of false benevolence, the face of Old Comet, the police spy.

With a sudden snap of the teeth, Adam sprang up and walked out of the church. He could not share his God with Old Comet.

Chapter Thirty-One

ON THE EVE

WITH a new and unrecognisable emotion, not even resembling that in which he left the Pro-Cathedral, save only for the purposes of his Easter Duty, for the last time, Adam marched straight out of the church of St Francis Xavier and walked swiftly back to St George's Place. Usually he avoided touching on any religious subject with Herr Behre; deeming this to be something about which he and the musician never could agree. But to-day he was in the mood to talk with him about it. He went directly to his room, and, finding him there, told of his meeting with the police spy.

Herr Behre chuckled grimly. 'Has Mr Macarthy never made it clear to you,' said he, 'that a Jesuit is himself but a police spy of the Pope?'

Adam shook his head. 'I never heard Mr Macarthy say a word against any priest, not even Father Tudor.' This was not strictly true, but, as Adam had never heard Mr Macarthy say anything against Father Tudor which he thought half bad enough, he was under the impression he had said nothing at all.

Herr Behre shrugged his shoulders. 'Mr Macarthy,' said he, 'is half a Jesuit himself.'

Adam recalled what Father Clare had said to him at Clongowes. 'Was he ever in orders?' he asked. Herr Behre walked up and down the room and again shrugged his shoulders. 'Does anyone know what Mr Macarthy has or has not been?' he murmured. Adam protested: 'He never seems to me to hide anything."