Time had been when this convent, enlarged though it was by the piety of successive generations of early lords of Muirisc, still needed more room than it had to accommodate in comfort its host of inmates. But that time, alas! was now a musty tradition of bygone ages. Even before the great sectarian upheaval of the mid-Tudor period, the ancient family order of the Hostage’s Tears had begun to decline. I can’t pretend to give the reason. Perhaps the supply of The O’Mahony’s daughters fell off; possibly some obscure shift of fashion rendered marriage more attractive in their eyes. Only this I know, that when the Commissioners of Elizabeth, gleaning in the monastic stubble which the scythe of Henry had laid bare, came upon the nuns at Muirisc, whom the first sweep of the blade had missed, they found them no longer so numerous as they once had been. Ever since then the order had dwindled visibly. The three remaining ladies had, in their own extended cloistral career, seen the last habitable section of the convent fall into disuse and decay, until now only their own gaunt, stone-walled trio of cells, the school-room, the tiny chapel, and a chamber still known by the dignified title of the “reception hall,” were available for use. Here it was that a great mound of peat sparkled and glowed on the hearth, under a capricious draught which now sucked upward with a whistling swoop whole clods of blazing turf--now, by a contradictory freak, half-filled the room with choking bog-smoke. Still, even when eyes were tingling and nostrils aflame, it was better to be here than outside, and better to have company than be alone. Both propositions were shiningly clear to the mind of Corinac O’Daly, as he mixed a second round of punch, and, peering through the steam from his glass at the audience gathered by the hearth, began talking again. The three aged nuns, who had heard him talk ever since he was born, sat decorously together on a bench and watched him, and listened as attentively as if his presence were a complete novelty. Their chaplain, a snuffy, half-palsied little old man, Father Harrington to wit, dozed and blinked and coughed at the smoke in his chair by the fire as harmlessly as a house-cat on the rug. Mrs. Fergus O’Mahony, a plump and buxom widow in the late twenties, with a comely, stupid face, framed in little waves of black, crimped hair pasted flat to the skin, sat opposite the priest, glass in hand. Whenever the temptation to yawn became too strong, she repressed it by sipping at the punch.