“Yes.” The man stared. He shut the book and began to push it back into his case. His eagerness to get away made Father Conroy want to play him a little longer.

“Hold on! Aren’t you going to try me?”

The man looked around, as if afraid of a crowd emerging from the darkening hedgerows and tiptoeing in to surround him.

“Oh, come on, you can’t announce that news to me and then leave me here. What are we waiting for?”

The man looked down at the book in his hand; he could hardly have read it now, it was growing so dark. For a moment, rain flaked the roadway, very lightly, then the cloud thinned out. A star showed briefly in the evening sky. It was bitter cold.

The man stirred and looked suddenly into Father Conroy’s face. Poor divil, thought Father Conroy, let him alone! He’s only doing this for a job. But I don’t know what to say; I don’t know how to stop this now.

The man opened the book and again began to push through the pages, back and forth, like a dog which had lost the scent. Mother of God, thought Father Conroy, he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. No wonder he’s doing this for a job.

But the man had a text at last. He held it with one close-bitten nail, while he laboriously spelled out, “If anyone wants to come after me, let him disown himself and pick up his torture stake and follow me continually.”

“Take up his cross and follow me.”

“No.” He inspected the verse carefully and shook his head.

“His torture stake.”

“An inferior version,” said Father Conroy. He saw the man look at him and then look at the book in alarm. “Well, I must go,” he said, and began to turn away.

“I’m sorry.” The man smiled again. “You owe me fourpence.”

“Fourpence?” And then he looked down at the pamphlet.

“I don’t want it,” he said and thrust it into the man’s hand. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t read it anyway.”

He turned his back on that painful smile and hurried to his gate. There he paused, feeling his back exposed, but the man was walking away, his figure moving into the darkness between the hedges with a lame, slovenly gait, which yet impelled him steadily forward.

He never saw the man again, nor heard how things had gone with him in Donore; in fact, no one there remembered having met him. Perhaps he had walked right through the town and out the far side – that would not have been difficult.