e) and then said, in a low
voice:

"Has it ever happened that you have suffered from privation and hard
work and loss of sleep and bad lodgings and . . . and exposure?"

His great searching eyes seemed to be looking straight into my soul, and
I could not have lied to him if I had wished, so I told him a little
(just a little) about my life in London--at Bayswater, in the East End
and Ilford.

"And did you get wet sometimes, very wet, through all your clothes?" he
asked me.

I told him No, but suddenly remembering that during the cold days after
baby came (when I could not afford a fire) I had dried her napkins on my
body, I felt that I could not keep that fact from him.

"You dried baby's napkins on your own body?" he asked.

"Sometimes I did. Just for a while," I answered, feeling a little
ashamed, and my tears rising.

"Ah!" he said, and then turning to the old doctor, "What a mother will
do for her child, Conrad!"

The eyes of Doctor Conrad (which seemed to have become swollen) were
still fixed on the face of his colleague, and, speaking as if he had
forgotten that I was present with them in the room, he said:

"You think she's very ill, don't you?"

"We'll talk of that in your consulting-room," said the strange doctor.

Then, telling me to lie quiet and they would come back presently, he
went downstairs and Martin's father followed him.

Nurse came up while they were away (she had taken possession of me
during the last few days), and I asked her who were in the
parlour-kitchen.

"Only Father Donovan and Mrs. Conrad--and baby," she told me.

Then the doctors came back--the consultant first, trying to look
cheerful, and the old doctor last, with a slow step and his head down,
as if he had been a prisoner coming back to court to receive sentence.

"My lady," said the strange doctor, "you are a brave woman if ever there
was one, so we have decided to tell you the truth about your condition."

And then he told me.

I was not afraid. I will not say that I was not sorry. I could have
wished to live a little longer--especially now when (but for the
Commandment of God) love and happiness seemed to be within my grasp.

But oh, the relief! There was something sacred in it, something
supernatural. It was as if God Himself had come down to me in the
bewildering maze that was haunted by the footsteps of my fate and led me
out of it.

Yet why these poor weak words? They can mean so little to anybody except