When her mother died Sarah left the boarding-school and returned to Dunadry Rectory to look after her father. She cooked for him, and cleaned, and attended to the back-yard fowls—her mother’s chores when she had been alive. In winter the moisture that had gathered on the inside of the rectory’s window-panes froze. In autumn the gutters dripped and the dank kitchen smelt for a while of some penetrating decay. In spring the wind rattled the doors and gusted beneath the threadbare carpets on the bedroom floors. In summer Sarah walked alone on meadow paths or lanes decorated with cowparsley as lacy as the First Communion dresses of the Catholic children on their way to summer Mass in Bandon. It was then that she missed Carriglas most, as she had missed it among the suburban roads and crescents that lay about the Misses Goodbody’s School for Protestant Girls. For ever, it seemed to her, she and her father would journey on Sundays in the pony and trap to Dunadry church, where his scratchy voice would deliver yet another sermon that bewildered his parishioners. For ever she would re-darn the old darns in his clothes, her only excitement the weekly shopping in Bandon.

Dunadry Rectory, November 6th, 1928. The days are heavy with the weight of their dragging. Invariably in silence, we sit over the food I cook. Father is abstracted, his thoughts occupied by the progress of his scholarship. He makes no reference to it, nor does he seek to know if I have spoken to anyone particular in Bandon. I believe I might cut my hair down to the roots and still he would not comment. It is not his way. I cannot unfairly blame him.

Dunadry Rectory, February 10th, 1929. Sometimes I hear the chatter of the girls. The brown school diningroom, with its gaslight softly hissing, seems not as awful as once I thought it. The faces of the girls pass through my mind, and one by one I attach remembered names to them. Even the towns they came from return to me: New Ross and Navan, Corey and Sligo and Dundalk, Bruff and Thurles, Birr and Cappoquin. They came from country places too, and still I clearly see the addresses on the envelopes of their letters home, which every Saturday I inspected for smudges of ink or a poorly formed script. This evening, while serving some dish or other I had cooked, I heard again Miss Fawson’s voice. It went on, and on again, about the weather. I listened with nostalgia.