I felt on reflection (she was sure I should) that I ought to
return with her to Rome.

I did not reply. Perhaps it was partly because I was physically weak
that my darling's warning was so nearly overcome. But the moment the
door closed on the Reverend Mother a conviction of the truth of what she
had said rushed upon me like the waves of an overflowing sea.

Yet how cruel! After all our waiting, all our longing, all our gorgeous
day-dreams of future happiness! When I was going to be a bride, a happy
bride, with my lost and stolen girlhood coming back to me!

For the second time a dark and frowning mountain had risen between
Martin and me. Formerly it had been my marriage--now it was my God.

But if God forbade my marriage with Martin what was I to do? What was
left in life for me? Was there anything left?

I was sitting with both hands over my face, asking myself these
questions and struggling with a rising tempest of tears, when I heard
baby crying in the room below, and Christian Ann hushing and comforting
her.

"What's doing on the _boght_, I wonder?"

A few minutes later they came upstairs, Isabel on her grandmother's arm,
in her nightdress, ready for bed.

"If it isn't the wind I don't know in the world what's doing on the
_millish_," said the old lady.

And then baby smiled through the big round beads that stood in her
sea-blue eyes and held out her arms to me.

Oh God! Oh God! Was not _this_ my answer?

ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEENTH CHAPTER

In her different way Christian Ann had arrived at the same conclusion.
Long before the thought came to me she had conceived the idea that
Father Dan and the Reverend Mother were conspiring to carry me off, and
in her dear sweet womanly jealousy (not to speak of higher and nobler
instincts) she had resented this intensely.

For four days she had smothered her wrath, only revealing it to baby in
half-articulate interviews over the cradle ("We're no women for these
nun bodies, going about the house like ghosts, are we, _villish_?"), but
on the fifth day it burst into the fiercest flame and the gentle old
thing flung out at everybody.

That was the morning of the departure of the Reverend Mother, who, after
saying good-bye to me in my bedroom, had just returned to the
parlour-kitchen, where Father Dan was waiting to take her to the railway
station.

What provoked Christian Ann's outburst I never rightly knew, for though
the door to the staircase was open,