Then I walked upstairs alone, quite alone, and when I reached the top he was still at the bottom looking up at me.  I smiled down to him, then walked firmly into my room and up to my bed, and then . . . down, all my strength gone in a moment.

* * * * *

I have had such a wonderful experience during the night.  It was like a dream, and yet something more than a dream.  I don’t want to make too much of it—­to say that it was a vision or any supernatural manifestation such as the blessed Margaret Mary speaks about.  Perhaps it was only the result of memory operating on my past life, my thoughts and desires.  But perhaps it was something higher and more spiritual, and God, for my comforting, has permitted me to look for one moment behind the veil.

I thought it was to-morrow—­my wedding day, and the day of Father Dan’s thanksgiving celebration—­and I was sitting by my French window (which was wide open) to look at the procession.

I seemed to see everything—­Father Dan in his surplice, the fishermen in their clean “ganzies,” the village people in their Sunday clothes, the Rechabites, the Foresters, and the Odd-fellows with their coloured badges and banners coming round the corner of the road, and the mothers with babies too young to be left looking on from the bridge.

I thought the procession passed under my window and went on to the church, which was soon crowded, leaving numbers of people to kneel on the path in front, as far down as the crumbling gate piers which lean towards each other, their foundations having given way.

Then I thought Benediction began, and when the congregation sang I sang also.  I heard myself singing: 

     “Mater purissima,
       Ora pro nobis.”

Down to this moment I thought I had been alone, but now the Reverend Mother entered my room, and she joined me.  I heard her deep rich voice under mine: 

     “Mater castissima
       Ora pro nobis.”

Then I thought the Ora ended, and in the silence that followed it I heard Christian Arm talking to baby on the gravel path below.  I had closed my eyes, yet I seemed to see them, for I felt as if I were under some strange sweet anaesthetic which had taken away all pain but not all consciousness.

Then I thought I saw Martin come close under my window and lift baby up to me, and say something about her.

I tried to answer him and could not, but I smiled, and then there was darkness, in which I heard voices about me, with somebody sobbing and Father Dan saying, as he did on the morning my mother died: 

“Don’t call her back.  She’s on her way to God’s beautiful paradise after all her suffering.”

After that the darkness became still deeper, and the voices faded away, and then gradually a great light came, a beautiful, marvellous, celestial light, such as Martin describes when he speaks about the aurora, and then . . .  I was on a broad white snowy plateau, and Martin was walking by my side.