l now in the sweet eyes that looked
up at me, that at certain moments I would fall into a long reverie and
my heart would be full of adoration.

What lengths I went to!

It was the height of the London season when baby came; and sometimes at
night, looking through my window, I saw the tail-end of the long queue
of carriages and electric broughams which stretched to the end of the
street I lived in, from the great houses fronting the Park where balls
and receptions were being held until the early hours of morning. But I
never envied the society ladies they were waiting for. On the contrary I
pitied them, remembering they were childless women for the most part and
thinking their pleasures were hollow as death compared with mine.

I pitied the rich mothers too--the mothers who banish their babies to
nurseries to be cared for by servants, and I thought how much more
blessed was the condition of poor mothers like myself who kept all that
sweetness to themselves.

How happy I was! No woman coming into a fortune was ever so happy. I
sang all day long. Sometimes it was the sacred music of the convent in
which each note, with its own glory of sound, wraps one's heart round as
with a rainbow, but more frequently it was "Ramsey Town" or "Sally's the
gel for me," which were only noisy nonsense but dear to me by such
delicious memories.

My neighbours would come to their doors to listen, and when I had
stopped I would hear them say:

"Our lady is a 'appy 'cart, isn't she?"

I suppose it was because I was so happy that my looks returned to me,
though I did not know it was so until one morning, after standing a
moment at the window, I heard somebody say:

"Our lady seems to be prettier than ever now her baby has come."

I should not have been a woman if I could have resisted that, so I ran
to the glass to see if it was true, and it was.

The ugly lines that used to be in my cheeks had gone, my hair had
regained its blue-black lustre, and my eyes had suddenly become bright
like a darkened room when the shutters are opened and the sunshine
streams into it.

But the coming of baby did better for me than that. It brought me back
to God, before whom I now felt so humble and so glad, because he had
transformed the world for me.

Every Catholic will know why I could not ask for the benediction of the
Church after childbirth; but he will also know why I was in a fever of
anxiety to have my baby baptized at the earliest possible