moment. It was
not that I feared her death (I never thought of that in those days), but
because I lived in dread of the dangers which had darkened my thoughts
before she was born.

So when baby was nearly a fortnight old I wrote to the Rector of a
neighbouring Catholic Church asking when I might bring her to be
baptized, and he sent me a printed reply, giving the day and hour, and
enclosing a card to be filled up with her name and all other
particulars.

What a day of joy and rapture was that of my baby's baptism! I was up
with the sun on the morning appointed to take her to church and spent
hours and hours in dressing her.

How lovely she looked when I had finished! I thought she was the
sweetest thing in the world, sweeter than a rosebud under its sparkling
web of dew when the rising sun is glistening on it.

After I had put on all the pretty clothes I had prepared for her before
she was born--the christening robe and the pelisse and the knitted
bonnet with its pink ribbons and the light woollen veil--I lifted her up
to the glass to look at herself, being such a child myself and so
wildly, foolishly happy.

"That old Rector won't see anything equal to her _this_ summer morning
anyway," I thought.

And then the journey to church!

I have heard that unmarried mothers, going out for the first time after
their confinement, feel ashamed and confused, as if every passer-by must
know their shameful secret. I was a kind of unmarried mother myself, God
help me, but I had no such feeling. Indeed I felt proud and gay, and
when I sailed out with my baby in my arms I thought all the people in
our street were looking at me, and I am sure I wanted to say "Good
morning" to everybody I met on my way.

The church was not in a joyous quarter. It stood on the edge of a poor
and very populous district, with a flaunting public-house immediately
opposite. When I got to it I found a number of other mothers (all
working women), with their babies and the godfathers and godmothers they
had provided for them, waiting at the door.

At this sight I felt very stupid, for I had been thinking so much about
other things (some of them vain enough perhaps) that I had forgotten the
necessity for sponsors; and I do not know what I should have done at
that last moment if the sacristan had not come to my relief--finding me
two old people who, for a fee of a shilling each, were willing to stand
godmother and godfather to my darling.

Then the