He took up his jacket from where he had draped it on the back of a chair beside the bed. "Good-bye, Sister," he said. "I'll see you on Thursday."

Still she would not look at him and said nothing, only made a little breathy sound down her nostrils that might have been a snicker of disdain. From the Judge too there was no response, and his eyes were turned away, as if in bleak disdain, towards the hills.

IN BAGGOT STREET QUIRKE ATE A VILE DINNER IN A CHINESE RESTAUrant, and afterwards walked back to his flat trying to strip a scum of grease from his front teeth with his tongue. Nowadays, without the anesthetic of alcohol, he found the evenings the most difficult, especially in this midsummer season with its lingering white nights. His friends, or at least the few acquaintances he used to have, were pub people, and on the rare occasions when he met them now it was plain that he made them nervous in his newfound sober state. He thought of going to the pictures, but then saw himself sitting alone in the flickering dark among scores of courting couples, and even the deserted silence of his flat on a sun-washed summer evening seemed preferable. Arrived at the shabby Georgian house in Upper Mount Street where he lived, he closed the front door soundlessly behind him and went softly along the hall and up the stairs. He always felt somehow an intruder here, among these hanging shadows and this silence.

And in his flat on the third floor there was the usual atmosphere of tight-lipped stealth, as if something vaguely nefarious had been going on that had ceased instantly at the sound of his key in the door. He stood for a moment in the middle of the living room, the key still in his hand, looking about at his things: the characterless furniture, the obsessively neat bookshelves, the artist's wooden manikin on a little table by the window with its arms melodramatically upflung.