ain
with her as long as she lived.

It was a long, long way back, I remember, and when I reached home
(having looked neither to the right nor left, nor at anything or
anybody, though I felt as if everybody had been looking at me) I had a
sense of dimness of sight and of aching in the eyeballs.

I did not sing very much that day, and I thought baby was rather
restless.

Towards nightfall I had a startling experience.

I was preparing Isabel for bed, when I saw a red flush, like a rash,
down the left side of her face.

At first I thought it would pass away, but when it did not I called my
Welsh landlady upstairs to look at it.

"Do you see something like a stain on baby's face?" I asked, and then
waited breathlessly for her answer.

"No . . . Yes . . . Well," she said, "now that thee'st saying so . . .
perhaps it's a birthmark."

"A birthmark?"

"Did'st strike thy face against anything when baby was coming?"

I made some kind of reply, I hardly know what, but the truth, or what I
thought to be the truth, flashed on me in a moment.

Remembering my last night at Castle Raa, and the violent scene which had
occurred there, I told myself that the flush on baby's face was the mark
of my husband's hand which, making no impression upon me, had been
passed on to my child, and would remain with her to the end of her life,
as the brand of her mother's shame and the sign of what had been called
her bastardy.

How I suffered at the sight of it! How time after time that night I
leaned over my sleeping child to see if the mark had passed away! How
again and again I knelt by her side to pray that if sin of mine had to
be punished the punishment might fall on me and not on my innocent babe!

At last I remembered baby's baptism and told myself that if it meant
anything it meant that the sin in which my child had been born, the sin
of those who had gone before her (if sin it was), had been cast out of
her soul with the evil spirits which had inspired them.

"_This sign of the Holy Cross + which we make upon her forehead do
thou, accursed devil, never dare to violate_."

God's law had washed my darling white! What could man's law--his proud
but puny morality--do to injure her? It could do nothing!

That comforted me. When I looked at baby again the flush had gone and I
went to bed quite happy.

NINETY-FIRST CHAPTER

I think it must have been the morning of the next day when the nurse who
had attended me in my