Lying there, watching the old priest pull on a nightshirt and kneel to say his interminable prayers, the boy felt he had discovered something he should not have known. Excited, he wanted to speak to the old man, to ask him – what? Whatever it was, the silent figure knelt at the bedside, head in hands, and at last the boy dozed off and was only vaguely aware of the sudden coldness in the bed, as if all the warmth in which he had been cocooned were being drained away. Even through his sleep, he had been conscious of the cold all night.

Was the old man aware of him? Of course not. And yet, that scene, so long forgotten, must have forged some link between them, so that, later, when he got those vague and wandering letters, addressed to Frank instead of to him, he had kept them, knowing that they had indeed been meant for him. Yes, he remembered now the feeling of affection which they had aroused. That was why he had put them carefully by – he had thought of the old priest remembering the small boy staring wide-eyed at him from the bed. Why else would they have been written so trustfully? Why else would they have been written at all?

Why didn’t I ever write to anybody like that? Because I never needed to. I was among my own people. I was secure. Warm. Or was I? What is warmth?

He remembered a night he woke up to hear the wind tearing at the brittle Scotch pines along the edge of the wood. The rain beat against the window under the eaves, and lightning flashed in the room, so that the shape of the bed and chest edged through the blackness that followed. Yet, he lay calmly watching (though he must have been crying earlier or he wouldn’t have been in that room, in his parents’ bed, with his father’s arm about him). Yes, that was warmth, that was security, well-being, warmth.

Father Conroy drifted into sleep. With his legs drawn up, he slept in his own foreshortened area of warmth, while the light deepened into dusk and the distant tractor fell silent.

He had a disturbing dream. He dreamed he awoke with the knowledge that there was someone in the house, moving about downstairs.

He sat up in bed, listening, but could not hear a sound, and though he was not afraid of a thief, he felt the utmost reluctance to move. Only when he got out of bed and switched on the light by the door did he realize that he was not in his own house, but was back in his room in Rosnagree.