Don’t mind all this. It’s an old man rambling, and he after living too much on his own. The doctor tells me I must give up the reading and the pondering over problems that will never get anyone anywhere. He doesn’t tell me what else I’m to do with myself. I’d be better if I could eat, but I suffer badly from wind on the stomach (they’ve come against me now, all those Sundays I spent riding from one pueblo to the next without breaking my fast). I’m not complaining – it’s God’s holy will – but when I eat one of those damn tortillas and think of a good feed of bacon and cabbage in the big kitchen, at home in beloved Rosnagree... Frank, I could take it all and more, if I wasn’t tormented by so many things that Christ left...

The end of the paragraph was heavily crossed out. The next paragraph began:

I’m enclosing something to help you over these last couple of terms and to lighten the expenses of your mother. I’m sorry it’s not more. I haven’t helped you as I should have, all these years in college. Say a prayer for me on that day, and may God direct you and bring you safely to His altar. May He grant also that you’ll be a better priest and a better man than your idle and complaining old uncle. Give my love to the family and especially to Tom, that little schemer with all the talk.

Yours in Jesus Christ,

JOSEPH CONROY

Father Mahon refolded the letter grimly, What an unsuitable letter to write to a senior student in sight of ordination! Things must have been pretty lax in those days. If it happened now, he would see to it that the letter was stopped and sent back to whoever it came from, or better still, burned straightaway. The man’s wits were wandering, judging by the way he had mistaken Frank for Tom. Frank had, of course, been at the seminary for a time, but he had left the year before Tom came. That must have been at least six years before the letter was written.

But why had it been kept? Why should Father Conroy have been reading it lately? It was a question he would have liked to mention to the Bishop, but he knew he would be told it had no connection with the matter in hand.

He had a quick look through the drawers of the desk. There was no sign of a bank book. He looked through the bookcase – nothing very exciting, Dickens, Shakespeare, some old college textbooks. O’Leary might keep some of them, and the rest, O’Leary’s housekeeper might be persuaded to pack into bundles for the auction rooms.