“My daughter!  My daughter!  Here is our little Mary.  She has come home to see you.”

Never shall I forget what followed.  First, my mother’s long lashes parted and she looked at me with a dazed expression as if still in a sort of dream.  Then her big eyes began to blaze like torches in dark hollows, and then (though they had thought her strength was gone and her voice would never be heard again) she raised herself in her bed, stretched out her arms to me, and cried in loud strong tones: 

“Mally veen!  My Mally veen!”

How long I lay with my arms about my mother, and my mother’s arms about me I do not know.  I only know that over my head I heard Father Dan saying, as if speaking to a child: 

“You are happy now, are you not?”

“Yes, yes, I am happy now,” my mother answered.

“You have everything you want?”

“Everything—­everything!”

Then came my father’s voice, saying: 

“Well, you’ve got your girl, Isabel.  You wanted her, so we sent for her, and here she is.”

“You have been very good to me, Daniel,” said my mother, who was kissing my forehead and crying in her joy.

When I raised my head I found Father Dan in great excitement.

“Did you see that then?” he was saying to Doctor Conrad.

“I would have gone on my knees all the way to Blackwater to see it.”

“I couldn’t have believed it possible,” the Doctor replied.

“Ah, what children we are, entirely.  God confounds all our reckoning.  We can’t count with His miracles.  And the greatest of all miracles is a mother’s love for her child.”

“Let us leave her now, though,” said the Doctor.  “She’s like herself again, but still . . .”

“Yes, let us leave them together,” whispered Father Dan, and having swept everybody out before him (I thought Aunt Bridget went away ashamed) he stepped off himself on tiptoe, as if treading on holy ground.

Then my mother, who was holding my hand and sometimes putting it to her lips, said: 

“Tell me everything that has happened.”

As soon as my little tongue was loosed I told her all about my life at the Convent—­about the Reverend Mother and the nuns and the novices and the girls (all except Sister Angela and Alma) and the singing of the hymn to the Virgin—­talking on and on and on, without observing that, after a while, my mother’s eyes had closed again, and that her hand had become cold and moist.

At length she said:  “Is it getting dark, Mary?”

I told her it was night and the lamp was burning.

“Is it going out then?” she asked, and when I answered that it was not she did not seem to hear, so I stopped talking, and for some time there was silence in which I heard nothing but the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, the barking of a sheep dog a long way off, and the husky breathing in my mother’s throat.