Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III At half-past three in the afternoon of the day following the station at Mike Blake’s, Father James Mahon leant over the iron gate of the narrow garden that separated his house from the main road leading from the village of Bourneen to the town of Liscannow. His soft felt hat was pulled well down over his eyes, to shade them from the almost level rays of the sun. A single, bare, elm tree on the other side of the road made a beautiful pattern against the burnished gold of the sky. The patch of sea in the distance by Liscannow glittered like a silver mirror; while the clefts of the mountain, at the base of which the town seemed to nestle, were already a deep purple. Bourneen chapel and village on his left, usually gaunt and ugly under a prevailing grey sky, now glowed with genial warmth. But Father James was not interested in light effects. He had no eye for the brilliant colours, purples and greens and soft pinks, which the mixed slates on his church threw back to the sun. He saw only the stumpy tower of the barn-like building. It occupied his thoughts, in short, jerky spasms of annoyance and relief, at intervals when he was not moodily gazing at the road, thinking of nothing in particular; or wondering why Father Malone was so late; or counting the chances of Father Delahunty dropping in to dinner on hisway home from Liscannow; or angrily asking himself why he had invited Father Delahunty at all when he met him accidentally in the road in the morning, especially as he didn’t like him, and, moreover, as he would be in the way when Mike Blake called. The thought of Mike Blake brought him back to the church tower, and he resisted an interesting thought as to how his three bullocks were doing on Larry Reardon’s land. It was a nuisance that the priest who built the ch…
