Myles Shannon and his nephew Ulick sat at breakfast in the dining-room of the big house among the trees. The Irish Times of the previous day's date was crackling in the elder man's hand.  
"Did you ever think of joining the Army, Ulick? It is most extraordinary, the number of ne'er-do-wells who manage to get commissions just now. Why I think there should be no bother at all if you tried. With your knowledge I fancy you could get into the R.A.M.C. It is evidently infernally easy. I suppose your conduct at the University would have nothing to do with your chances of acceptance or rejection?"
 
"Oh, not at all."
 
"I thought not."
 
"But I fancied, uncle, that when I came down here from Dublin I had done with intending myself to kill people. That is, with joining any combination for purposes of slaughter."
 
Myles Shannon lifted his eyes from the paper and smiled. Evidently he did not appreciate the full, grim point of the joke, but he rather fancied there was something subtle about it, and it was in that quiet and venerable tradition of humorous things his training had led him to enjoy. This was one of the reasons why, even though a Catholic and a moderate Nationalist, he had[Pg 189] remained a devoted reader of the Irish Times. He was conservative even in his humor.
 
"But in Army medical work, however, there is always the compensating chance of the gentleman with the license to kill getting killed himself," continued Ulick.
 
His lips closed now, for he had at last come to the end of his joke. The conversation lapsed, and Mr. Shannon went on with his reading. Ulick had been to Garradrimna on the previous evening, and he was acutely conscious of many defects in his own condition and in the condition of the world about him this morning. His thoughts were now extending with all the power of which they were capable to his uncle, that silent, intent man, whose bald head stretched expansively before him.
 
Myles Shannon was a singularly fine man, and in thinking of him as such his mind began to fill with imaginations of the man his father must have been. He had never known his father nor, for the matter of that, could he boast of any deep acquaintance with his uncle, yet what an excellent, restrained type of man he was to be sure! Another in the same position as his guardian would have flogged himself into a fury over the mess he had made of his studies. But it had not been so with his uncle. He had behaved with a calm forbearance. He had supplied him with time and money, and had gone even so far as to look kindly upon the affair with Rebecca Kerr. He had been here since the beginning of the year, and all his uncle had so far said to him by way of asserting his authority was spoken very quietly:
 
[Pg 190]
 
"Now, I'll give you a fair time to think over things. I'll give you till the end of the summer holidays, till after young Brennan comes and goes." These had been his uncle's exact words, and he had not attempted to question them or to qualify them at the time. But just now they were running through his brain with the most curious throbbing insistence. "Till after young Brennan comes and goes." He knew that his uncle had taken an unusual fancy to John Brennan and evidently wished that his summer holidays should be spent enjoyably. But it was a long time until summer, and he was not a person one might conscientiously commend to the friendship of a clerical student. He very often went to Garradrimna.
 
Ulick had already formed some impressions of his fellow man. He held it as his opinion that at the root of an action, which may appear extraordinary because of its goodness, is always an amount of selfishness. Yet, somehow, as he carefully considered his uncle in the meditative spaces of the breakfast he could not fit him in with this idea.
 
As he went on with his thought he felt that it was the very excess of his uncle's qualities which had had such a curious effect upon his relations with Rebecca Kerr. It was the very easiness of the path he had afforded to love-making which now made it so difficult. If they had been forbidden and if they had been persecuted, their early affection must have endured more strongly. The opposition of the valley and the village still continued, but Ulick considered their bearing upon him now as he had always considered it—with contempt.
 
There had been a good deal of wild affection [Pg 191]transported into their snatched meetings during the past summer in Donegal. After Christmas, too, he had gone there to see her, and then had happened the climax of their love-making in a quiet cottage within sound of the sea.... Both had moved away from that glowing moment forever changed. Neither could tell of the greatness of the shadow that had fallen between them.
 
He remembered all her tears on the first evening he had met her after coming back to the valley. There had been nothing in her letters, only the faintest suggestion of some strained feeling. Then had come this unhappy meeting.... She had tortured herself into the belief that it was she who was responsible for his failure.
 
"With all the time you have wasted coming to see me I have destroyed you. When you should have been at your studies I was taking you up to Donegal."
 
As he listened to these words between her sobs, there rushed in upon him full realization of all her goodness and the contrast of two pictures her words had called to his mind.... There was he by her side, her head upon his shoulder in that lonely cottage in Donegal, their young lives lighting the cold, bare place around them.... And then the other picture of himself bent low over his dirty, thumb-greased books in that abominable street up and down which a cart was always lumbering. All the torture of this driving him to Doyle's pub at the corner, and afterwards along some squalid street of ill-fame with a few more drunken medical students.
 
He was glad to be with her again. They met very often during his first month at his uncle's house, in dark spots along the valley road and The Road of the Dead. Then he began to notice a curious reserve springing up[Pg 192] between them. She was becoming mysterious while at the same time remaining acutely present in his life.
 
One morning she had asked him if he intended to remain long in the valley, and he had not known how to reply to her. Another time she had asked him if he was going to retire altogether from the study of medicine, and with what did he intend to occupy himself now? And, upon a certain occasion, she had almost asked him was it the intention of his uncle to leave him the grand farm and the lovely house among the trees?
 
These were vexatious questions and so different from any part of the talk they used to have here in the valley last summer or at the cottage in Donegal. Her feeling of surrender in his presence had been replaced by a sense of possession which seemed the death of all that kindling of her heart. Then it had happened that, despite the encouragement of his uncle, a shadow had fallen upon his love-affair with Rebecca Kerr.... He was growing tired of his idle existence in the valley. Very slowly he was beginning to see life from a new angle. He was disgusted with himself and with the mess he had made of things in Dublin. He could not say whether it was her talk with him that had shamed him into th............