“Martin Conrad, seaman, deceased.”

The young clerk looked up quickly.

“Did you say Martin Conrad, ma’am?” he asked, and as well as I could for a click in my throat I answered: 

“Yes.”

He paused as if thinking; then with the same flourish as before he wrote that name also, and after he had done so, he twisted his face about to the old man, who was sitting behind him, and said, in a voice that was not meant to reach me: 

“Extraordinary coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Extraordinary!” said the old man, who had lowered his newspaper and was looking across at me over the rims of his spectacles.

“And now,” said the young clerk, “your own name and your maiden name if you please.”

“Mary O’Neill.”

The young clerk looked up at me again.  I was holding baby on my left arm and I could see that his eye caught my wedding ring.

“Mary Conrad, maiden name O’Neill, I presume?” he said.

I hesitated once more.  The old temptation was surging back upon me.  But making a great pull on my determination to tell the truth (or what I believed to be the truth) I answered: 

“No, Mary O’Neill simply.”

“Ah!” said the young clerk, and I thought his manner changed instantly.

There was silence for some minutes while the young clerk filled up his form and made the copy I was to carry away.

I heard the scratching of the young clerk’s pen, the crinkling of the old man’s newspaper, the hollow ticking of a round clock on the wall, the dull hum of the traffic in the streets, and the thud-thud-thudding in my own bosom.

Then the entry was read out to me and I was asked to sign it.

“Sign here, please,” said the young clerk in quite a different tone, pointing to a vacant line at the bottom of the hook, and I signed with a trembling hand and a feeling of only partial consciousness.

I hardly know what happened after that until I was standing in the open vestibule, settling baby on my arm afresh for my return journey, and telling myself that I had laid a stigma upon my child which would remain with her as long as she lived.

It was a long, long way back, I remember, and when I reached home (having looked neither to the right nor left, nor at anything or anybody, though I felt as if everybody had been looking at me) I had a sense of dimness of sight and of aching in the eyeballs.

I did not sing very much that day, and I thought baby was rather restless.

Towards nightfall I had a startling experience.

I was preparing Isabel for bed, when I saw a red flush, like a rash, down the left side of her face.

At first I thought it would pass away, but when it did not I called my Welsh landlady upstairs to look at it.

“Do you see something like a stain on baby’s face?” I asked, and then waited breathlessly for her answer.