y
circumstances.

While I was speaking I felt Mildred's hand twitching between mine, and
when I had finished she said:

"But, my dear child, they told me your friends were broken-hearted about
you; that you had lost your memory and perhaps your reason, and
therefore it would be a good act to help them to send you home."

"It's not true, it's not true," I said.

And then in a low voice, as if afraid of being overheard, she told me
how she came to be there--that the woman who had travelled with me in
the train from Liverpool, seeing my father's offer of a reward, had
written to him to say that she knew where I was and only needed somebody
to establish my identity; that my father wished to come to London for
this purpose, but had been forbidden by his doctor; that our parish
priest, Father Donovan, had volunteered to come instead, but had been
prohibited by his Bishop; and finally that my father had written to his
lawyers in London, and Father Dan to her, knowing that she and I had
been together at the Sacred Heart in Rome, and that it was her work now
to look after lost ones and send them safely back to their people.

"And now the lawyer and the doctors are downstairs," she said in a
whisper, "and they are only waiting for me to say who you are that they
may apply for an order to send you home."

This terrified me so much that I made a fervent appeal to Mildred to
save me.

"Oh, Mildred, save me, save me," I cried.

"But how can I? how can I?" she asked.

I saw what she meant, and thinking to touch her still more deeply I told
her the rest of my story.

I told her that if I had fled from my husband's house it was not merely
because he had been cruel and brutal to me, but because I, too, loved
somebody else--somebody who was far away but was coming back, and there
was nothing I could not bear for him in the meantime, no pain or
suffering or loneliness, and when he returned he would protect me from
every danger, and we should love each other eternally.

If I had not been so wildly agitated I should have known that this was
the wrong way with Mildred, and it was not until I had said it all in a
rush of whispered words that I saw her eyes fixed on me as if they were
about to start from their sockets.

"But, my dear, dear child," she said, "this is worse and worse. Your
father and your husband may have done wrong, but you have done wrong
too. Don't you see you have?"

I did not tell her that I had thought of a