"The people are very inconsiderate. Now, why did that man put off coming to fetch you till eleven o'clock last night? He knew his wife was ill." "Sometimes one is apt to think them inconsiderate." "The two volumes of miracle plays!" "Yes, and that's another danger, a book puts all kinds of ideas and notions into one's head. The idea of that playhouse came out of those books." "But," I said, "you do not think that God sent the storm because He did not wish a play to be performed." "One cannot judge God's designs. Whether God sent the storm or whether it was accident must remain a matter for conjecture, but it is not a matter of conjecture that one is doing certain good by devoting one's self to one's daily task, getting the Government to start new relief works, establishing schools for weaving--the people are entirely dependent upon me, and when I am attending to their wants I know I'm doing right. All the other is conjecture." The priest asked for further information regarding our system of payments, and I answered eagerly. I had begun to feel my curiosity to be disgraceful, and it was unnecessary,--my driver would tell me to-morrow why the playhouse had been abandoned. I relied on him to tell me; he was one of those who had the faculty for hearing things: he had heard that I had been up the hill with the priest to see the playhouse; he knew all about my walk with the priest, and was soon telling me that it was the curse of the Widow Sheridan that had brought down the wind that had wrecked the playhouse. For it was her daughter that the priest had chosen to play the part of Good Deeds in the miracle play. And the story the driver told me seemed true to the ideas of the primitive people who lived in the waste, and of the waste itself. The girl had been led astray one evening returning from rehearsal,--in the words of my car-driver, "She had been 'wake' going home one evening, and when the signs of her 'weakness' began to show upon her, her mother took the halter off the cow and tied the girl to the wall and kept her there until the child was born. And Mrs. Sheridan put a piece of string round its throat and buried it one night near the playhouse. And it was three nights after that the storm rose, and the child was seen pulling the thatch out of the roof." "But, did she murder the child?" "Sorra wan of me knows. She sent for the priest when she was dying, and told him what she had done." "But the priest would not reveal what he heard in the confession?" I said.