QUIRKE HAD LONG AGO LOST WHAT LITTLE FAITH HE MIGHT ONCE HAVE had in the Catholic pieties that the Brothers at the workhouse, officially known as Carricklea Industrial School, where he had endured his early childhood, had tried for so long to beat into him. Yet even now, when he was well into middle age, he still had his household gods, his not-to-be-toppled totems, one of which was the giant remnant of the man whom for most of his life he had unquestioningly taken to be good, even great. Garret Griffin, or the Judge, as everyone called him, even though it was some time since he had been in a position to deliver judgment on anything, had been felled the previous year, his seventy-third, by a stroke that had paralyzed him entirely, except for the muscles of his mouth and eyes and the tendons of his neck. He was confined, mute but in some way sentient, to a large white room on the third floor of the Presentation Convent of St. Louis in Rathfarnham, a far suburb of the city, where two windows, one in each of the adjoining corner walls of the room, looked out on two contrasting aspects of the Dublin Mountains, one rocky and barren, the other green and strewn with gorse. It was to these soft hills that his eyes turned constantly, with an expression of desperation, grief, and rage. Quirke marveled at how much of the man, how much of what was left of the living being, was concentrated now in his eyes; it was as if all the power of his personality had come crowding into these last, twin points of fierce and desperate fire.