“But Mary O’Neill isn’t for leaving her little one to go into any convent.  ’Deed no, ma’am!  There would be no rest on her if she did.  I’m a mother myself and I know what she’d be feeling.  You might put the black hood on her head, but Nature’s a wonderful powerful thing, and she’d never go to bed at night or get up in the morning without thinking of her baby.  ‘Where’s she now?’ she’d be asking herself.  ’What’s happening to my motherless child?’ she’d be saying.  And as the years went on she’d be thinking, ’Is she well, and has she taken her first communion, and is she growing up a good woman, and what’s the world doing on her?’ . . .

“No, ma’am, no!  Mary O’Neill will go into no convent while her child is here to be cared for!  ’Deed she won’t!  Not Mary O’Neill!  I’ll never believe it of her!  Never in this world!”

I heard nothing more for a long time after that—­nothing but a noise in my own head which drowned all other noises.  And when I recovered my composure the Reverend Mother and Father Dan must have gone, for there was no sound in the room below except that of the rocking-chair (which was going rapidly) and Christian Ann’s voice, fierce but broken as if baby had cried and she was comforting her.

Then a great new spirit came to me.  It was Motherhood again!  The mighty passion of motherhood—­which another mighty passion had temporarily overlaid—­sweeping down on me once more out of the big, simple, child-like heart of my Martin’s mother.

In the fever of body and brain at that moment it seemed to solve all the problems of life for me.

If the Commandment of God forbade me to marry again because I had already taken vows before the altar (no matter how innocently or under what constraint), and if I had committed a sin, a great sin, and baby was the living sign of it, there was only one thing left me to do—­to remain as I was and consecrate the rest of my life to my child.

That would be the real expiation, not burying myself in a convent.  To live for my child!  Alone with her!  Here, where my sin had been, to work out my atonement!

This pleased and stirred and uplifted me very much when I first thought of it.  And even when I remembered Martin, and thought how hard it would be to tear myself away from the love which waited with open arms for me (So near, so sweet, so precious), there seemed to be something majestic, almost sublime, in the sacrifice I was about to make—­the sacrifice of everything in the world (except one thing) that was dearer to me than life itself.

A sort of spiritual pride came with the thought of this sacrifice.  I saw myself as a woman who, having pledged herself to God in her marriage and sinned against the law in breaking her marriage vows, was now going to accept her fate and to humble herself before the bar of Eternal Justice.

But oh, what a weak, vain thing I was, just when I thought I was so strong and noble!