IN the June of the following year Norah Ryan received a letter from Scotland. It ran:

“Who would that letter be from?” asked Mary Ryan from her seat in the chimney corner. A pile of dead ashes lay on the hearth; the previous summer had been wet and the turf was not lifted from the bog.

“It’s from Sheila Carrol, mother.”

“From that woman, child! And what would she be writing to you for, Norah?”

“She’s dying to hear from the Frosses people,” answered the girl. “And it is very lonely away in the big city.”

“Lonely!” exclaimed the mother. “If she is lonely it’s her own fault. It’s the hand of God that’s heavy on her because of her sin.”

“That’s no reason why the tongue of her country people should be bitter against her.”

“Saying that, child!” cried the woman. “What’s comin’ over you at all, girsha? Never let me hear of you writing to that woman!”

Norah went to the door and looked at the calm sea stretching out far below. The waves were bright under the glance of the sun; a dark boat, a little speck in the distance, was moving out towards the bar.

“Where are you going, Norah?” asked the woman at the fire.

“Down to the sea, mother,” answered the girl as she made her way towards the beach.

II

BETWEEN the ragged rocks the grass was soft to the feet and refreshing to the eyes. Two lone sycamore trees showed green against the sky; a few stray leaves, shrivelled and filed through by caterpillars, were fluttering to the earth. A long fairy-thimble stalk, partly despoiled by some heedless child but still bearing three beautiful bells at the extreme top, whipped backwards and forwards in the wind, and Norah, reaching forward, pulled off one of the flowers and pinned it to her breast.

The tide was on the turn. The girl sat on a rock by the shore and put her small brown feet in the water. Down under the moving waves they looked as if they didn’t belong to her at all. Here it was very quiet; the universal silence magnified the tranquillity of things. Under the girl’s feet it was very deep, very dark, and very peaceful; there, where a reflected swallow swept through a wide expanse of mirrored blue, in the sea under her, were no regrets, no heart-sickness, and no sorrow. When the tide went out a fair young body, a white face with closed eyes would lie on the strand. Then the Frosses people would know why the terrible phantom, Death, was courted by a girl.

“It was all a great mistake,” she said to herself, and in the excitement caused by the stress of thought she sank her nails into her palms. The memory of a night passed seven months before came vividly to her mind. How many tearful nights had gone by since then! How many times had she written to Alec Morrison telling him of her plight! No answer had come; the man was indifferent.

“I wasn’t the girl for the likes of him, anyway,” said Norah, looking at her feet in the water. “But why has all this happened to me?”

As in all great crises of a person’s life, there came a moment of vivid consciousness to Norah and every surrounding object stamped itself indelibly on her mind. The tide was sweeping slowly out; the seaweed in the pool beneath swayed like the hair of a dead body floating in the water. Two little fish with wide-open eyes looked up and seemed to be staring at her. Beneath in the water the fleecy clouds looked like little white spots against the blue of the mirrored sky, and the bar moaned loudly on the frontier of the deep sea.

“No matter what I do now, no one will think me worse than I am,” said the poor girl. “I’ll have no joy no more in my life, for there’s no happiness that I can look forward to.”

She pulled the fairy thimbles from her breast and crushed them in her hand. Out near the bar she could see the little black boat heaving on the waves. Norah rose to her feet.

How dark the water looked under her. The sand sloped sharply from her feet to the bottom of the pool, which was bedded with sharp rocks covered with trailing, slimy seaweed. She peered in, catching her breath sharply as she did so. Then one little brown foot went further into the water, afterwards the other. She bent down, cut the water apart with her hands; a slight ripple spread out on both sides and was lost almost as soon as it was formed.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, pray for me a sinner now and at the hour of my death, Amen,” she said, repeating a prayer which had flowed countless times since childhood from her lips.

A sudden thought struck her and a look of perplexity overspread her face. “This is pilin’ one sin on top of the other,” she said in a low voice and looked round, fearing that somebody had overheard her. Everything about was silent as if in fear; in that moment she thought that the sea had ceased to move, the swallow to circle, herself even to live; the world seemed to be waiting for something—an event of great and terrible purport, hidden and unknown.

Suddenly the child that was in her leapt under her heart and a keen but not unpleasant pain swept through her body. She drew back from the pool, horror-stricken at the thing which she intended to do.

“I’ll go home,” she said meekly, as if obeying some command. “Maybe he’ll have pity on me when I go over again beyond the water. This day week Micky’s Jim, he goes again. And I can go to Sheila Carrol. She knows and she has the good heart. God in His heaven have pity on me and all that’s like me! for it’s the ignorant girl that I was.... If anyone had told me.... But I knew nothin’, nothin’, and I’m black now in the eyes of God as I’ll soon be black in the eyes of the world, of Dermod Flynn, of me mother and everybody that knows me. Nobody will speak to me then atall, atall!”