How happy I was!  No woman coming into a fortune was ever so happy.  I sang all day long.  Sometimes it was the sacred music of the convent in which each note, with its own glory of sound, wraps one’s heart round as with a rainbow, but more frequently it was “Ramsey Town” or “Sally’s the gel for me,” which were only noisy nonsense but dear to me by such delicious memories.

My neighbours would come to their doors to listen, and when I had stopped I would hear them say: 

“Our lady is a ’appy ’cart, isn’t she?”

I suppose it was because I was so happy that my looks returned to me, though I did not know it was so until one morning, after standing a moment at the window, I heard somebody say: 

“Our lady seems to be prettier than ever now her baby has come.”

I should not have been a woman if I could have resisted that, so I ran to the glass to see if it was true, and it was.

The ugly lines that used to be in my cheeks had gone, my hair had regained its blue-black lustre, and my eyes had suddenly become bright like a darkened room when the shutters are opened and the sunshine streams into it.

But the coming of baby did better for me than that.  It brought me back to God, before whom I now felt so humble and so glad, because he had transformed the world for me.

Every Catholic will know why I could not ask for the benediction of the Church after childbirth; but he will also know why I was in a fever of anxiety to have my baby baptized at the earliest possible moment.  It was not that I feared her death (I never thought of that in those days), but because I lived in dread of the dangers which had darkened my thoughts before she was born.

So when baby was nearly a fortnight old I wrote to the Rector of a neighbouring Catholic Church asking when I might bring her to be baptized, and he sent me a printed reply, giving the day and hour, and enclosing a card to be filled up with her name and all other particulars.

What a day of joy and rapture was that of my baby’s baptism!  I was up with the sun on the morning appointed to take her to church and spent hours and hours in dressing her.

How lovely she looked when I had finished!  I thought she was the sweetest thing in the world, sweeter than a rosebud under its sparkling web of dew when the rising sun is glistening on it.

After I had put on all the pretty clothes I had prepared for her before she was born—­the christening robe and the pelisse and the knitted bonnet with its pink ribbons and the light woollen veil—­I lifted her up to the glass to look at herself, being such a child myself and so wildly, foolishly happy.

“That old Rector won’t see anything equal to her this summer morning anyway,” I thought.

And then the journey to church!

I have heard that unmarried mothers, going out for the first time after their confinement, feel ashamed and confused, as if every passer-by must know their shameful secret.  I was a kind of unmarried mother myself, God help me, but I had no such feeling.  Indeed I felt proud and gay, and when I sailed out with my baby in my arms I thought all the people in our street were looking at me, and I am sure I wanted to say “Good morning” to everybody I met on my way.