Later they all went to church, the Adairs sitting as usual in the top pew on one side of the little aisle, and the Parsonage folks in the top pew on the other side; just as they had sat ever since Jack and Paddy as children had had to be closely watched, because they would peep at each other and make signs behind their elders’ backs. Vivid recollections thronged the aunties’ minds that last Christmas before the boy left them. They remembered how he and Paddy would try to see who could sing the loudest, all out of tune of course, and had considerably disturbed the music of the whole congregation; how Jack, as a little chap, loved to slip out of the pew when his father was reading the Lessons, and stand beside him—and how once, when Paddy had happened to be sitting on the outside of the Adair’s pew as a reward for being a good girl, the temptation had been too much for her and she had slipped after Jack; of the Sunday Jack had put a little frog in her pocket, and she had found it and screamed out in church; and of another time when Paddy, exasperated because he would not look at her, had deliberately, in a fit of naughtiness, thrown a hymn book across the aisle at his head. For one and all there were recollections that saddened and gladdened at once, but perhaps for Eileen were the saddest of all, because the most hopeless. Close behind, on one side, where his thin profile had been distinctly visible, was the spot where Lawrence had often sat on a Sunday evening after coming to church, as she could not but know, especially to see her. The Blakes’ parish church was at Newry, but Lawrence was never seen there; if he went to church at all he walked over to Omeath, and went in to The Ghan House to supper afterward. It was in vain Eileen told herself he was unworthy, fickle; struggle as she would she could not tear him out of her heart, nor forget for a moment all he had been to her. The effort to do so, combined with her mourning for her father, and the dreariness of the future, had seriously affected her health the last few weeks, and just as they were finishing the first prayers, everyone was startled by the sound of a fall, and discovered Eileen in a dead faint. A second later, with a set, compressed expression, Jack had picked her up as when she was a child, and carried her out, across the churchyard and into the Parsonage. When he laid her down on the sofa, his own face was scarcely less white than the face on the cushions, and he smothered a sound that was almost a sob, as he turned away to make room for Mrs Adair and Aunt Jane.