short period of my great
love, and even making me think of my life in Rome, with its confessions,
its masses, and the sweetness of its church bells.

I was saying farewell to Mary O'Neill! And parting with oneself seemed
so terrible that when I thought of it my heart seemed ready to burst.

"But who can blame me when my child's life is in danger?" I asked myself
again, still tugging at my long gloves.

By the time I had finished dressing the Salvationists were going off to
their barracks with their followers behind them. Under the singing I
could faintly hear the shuffling of bad shoes, which made a sound like
the wash of an ebbing tide over the teeth of a rocky beach--up our side
street, past the Women's Night Shelter (where the beds never had time to
become cool), and beyond the public-house with the placard in the window
saying the ale sold there could be guaranteed to make anybody drunk for
fourpence.

"_We'll stand the storm, it won't be long,
And we'll anchor in the sweet by-and-by_."

I listened and tried to laugh again, but I could not do so now. There
was one last spasm of my cruelly palpitating heart, in which I covered
my face with both hands, and cried:

"For baby's sake! For my baby's sake!"

And then I opened my bedroom door, walked boldly downstairs and went out
into the streets.

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

I don't call it Chance that this was the very day of my return to
England.

If I had to believe that, I should have to disbelieve half of what is
best in the human story, and the whole of what we are taught about a
guiding Providence and the spiritual influences which we cannot reason
about and prove.

We were two days late arriving, having made dirty weather of it in the
Bay of Biscay, which injured our propeller and compelled us to lie to,
so I will not say that the sense of certainty which came to me off
Finisterre did not suffer a certain shock.

In fact the pangs of uncertainty grew so strongly upon me as we neared
home that in the middle of the last night of our voyage I went to
O'Sullivan's cabin, and sat on the side of his bunk for hours, talking
of the chances of my darling being lost and of the possibility of
finding her.

O'Sullivan, God bless him, was "certain sure" that everything would be
right, and he tried to take things gaily.

"The way I'm knowing she'll be at Southampton in a new hat and feather!
So mind yer oi, Commanther."

We passed the Channe