ners.

Martin Conrad I did not see, for in reward for some success at school
the doctor had allowed him to spend his Easter holidays in London in
order to look at Nansen's ship, the _Fram_, which had just then arrived
in the Thames.

Hence it happened that though home made a certain tug at me, with its
familiar sights and sounds, and more than once I turned with timid steps
towards my father's busy room, intending to say, "Please, father, don't
send me back to school," I made no demur when, six or seven days after
the funeral, Aunt Bridget began to prepare for my departure.

"There's odds of women," said Tommy the Mate, when I went into the
garden to say good bye to him "They're like sheep's broth, is women. If
there's a head and a heart in them they're good, and if there isn't you
might as well be supping hot water. Our Big Woman is hot water--but
she'll die for all."

Within a fortnight I was back at the Convent, and there the Reverend
Mother atoned to me for every neglect.

"I knew you would come back to me," she said, and from that hour onward
she seemed to be trying to make up to me for the mother I had lost.

I became deeply devoted to her. As a consequence her spirit became my
spirit, and, little by little, the religious side of the life of the
Convent took complete possession of me.

At first I loved the church and its services because the Reverend Mother
loved them, and perhaps also for the sake of the music, the incense, the
flowers and the lights on the altar; but after I had taken my communion,
the mysteries of our religion took hold of me--the Confessional with its
sense of cleansing and the unutterable sweetness of the Mass.

For a long time there was nothing to disturb this religious side of my
mind. My father never sent for me, and as often as the holidays came
round the Reverend Mother took me with her to her country home at Nemi.

That was a beautiful place--a sweet white cottage, some twenty
kilometres from Rome, at the foot of Monte Cavo, in the middle of the
remains of a mediaeval village which contained a castle and a monastery,
and had a little blue lake lying like an emerald among the green and red
of the grass and poppies in the valley below.

In the hot months of summer the place was like a Paradise to me, with
its roses growing wild by the wayside; its green lizards running on the
rocks; its goats; its sheep; its vineyards; its brown-faced boys in
velvet, and its gleesome girls in s