Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to
time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It
was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying
had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now
it was her mood to try and make up to him. But it had been something
different yesterday, and who could say what it would be tomorrow? He
really had passed the limit of patience with her shifting emotional
vagaries, now lurching in this direction, now in that. She had had her
chance to maintain a hold upon his interest and imagination, and had
let it slip. These were the accidents of life, the inevitable harsh
happenings in the great tragedy of Nature. They could not be helped, and
there was nothing more to be said.

He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest had said the
previous evening. He passed in review all the glowing tributes Father
Forbes had paid to Celia. They warmed his senses as he recalled them,
but they also, in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness.
There had been a personal fervor about them which was something more
than priestly. He remembered how the priest had turned pale and faltered
when the question whether Celia would escape the general doom of her
family came up. It was not a merely pastoral agitation that, he felt
sure.

A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions, crowded upward
together in his thoughts. It became apparent to him now that from the
outset he had been conscious of something queer--yes, from that very
first day when he saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their
glance of recognition inside the house of death. He realized now, upon
reflection, that the tone of other people, his own parishioners and his
casual acquaintances in Octavius alike, had always had a certain note of