“You must all go and rest.  Mary and I will be quite right now.”

A few minutes afterwards my mother and I were alone once more, and then she called me into her bed and clasped her arms about me and I lay with my face hidden in her neck.

What happened thereafter seems to be too sacred to write of, almost too sacred to think about, yet it is all as a memory of yesterday, while other events of my life have floated away to the ocean of things that are forgotten and lost.

“Listen, darling,” she said, and then, speaking in whispers, she told me she had heard all I had said about the Convent, and wondered if I would not like to live there always, becoming one of the good and holy nuns.

I must have made some kind of protest, for she went on to say how hard the world was to a woman and how difficult she had found it.

“Not that your father has been to blame—­you must never think that, Mary, yet still . . .”

But tears from her tender heart were stealing down her face and she had to stop.

Even yet I had not realised all that the solemn time foreboded, for I said something about staying with my mother; and then in her sweet voice, she told me nervously, breaking the news to me gently, that she was going to leave me, that she was going to heaven, but she would think of me when she was there, and if God permitted she would watch over me, or, if that might not be, she would ask our Lady to do so.

“So you see we shall never be parted, never really.  We shall always be together.  Something tells me that wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, I shall know all about it.”

This comforted me, and I think it comforted my mother also, though God knows if it would have done so, if, with her dying eyes, she could have seen what was waiting for her child.

It fills my heart brimful to think of what happened next.

She told me to say a De Profundis for her sometimes, and to think of her when I sang the hymn to the Virgin.  Then she kissed me and told me to go to sleep, saying she was going to sleep too, and if it should prove to be the eternal sleep, it would be only like going to sleep at night and awaking in the morning, and then we should be together again, and “the time between would not seem long.”

“So good-night, darling, and God bless you,” she said.

And as well as I could I answered her “Good-night!”

* * * * *

When I awoke from the profound slumber of childhood it was noon of the next day and the sun was shining.  Doctor Conrad was lifting me out of bed, and Father Dan, who had just thrown open the window, was saying in a tremulous voice: 

“Your dear mother has gone to God.”

I began to cry, but he checked me and said: 

“Don’t call her back.  She’s on her way to God’s beautiful Paradise after all her suffering.  Let her go!”