“Mally!  My Mally!  My poor, long-suffering darling!  My own again, God bless her!”

It was he, it was Martin, my Martin.  And, oh Mother of my Lord, he was carrying me upstairs in his arms.

SEVENTH PART

I AM FOUND

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTH CHAPTER

My return to consciousness was a painful, yet joyful experience.  It was almost like being flung in a frail boat out of a tempestuous sea into a quiet harbour.

I seemed to hear myself saying, “My child shall not die.  Poverty shall not kill her.  I am going to take her into the country . . . she will recover. . . .  No, no, it is not Martin.  Martin is dead. . . .  But his eyes . . . don’t you see his eyes. . . .  Let me go.”

Then all the confused sense of nightmare seemed to be carried away as by some mighty torrent, and there came a great calm, a kind of morning sweetness, with the sun shining through my closed eyelids, and not a sound in my ears but the thin carolling of a bird.

When I opened my eyes I was in bed in a room that was strange to me.  It was a little like the Reverend Mother’s room in Rome, having pictures of the Saints on the walls, and a large figure of the Sacred Heart over the mantelpiece; but there was a small gas fire, and a canary singing in a gilded cage that hung in front of the window.

I was trying to collect my senses in order to realize where I was when Sister Mildred’s kind face, in her white wimple and gorget, leaned over me, and she said, with a tender smile, “You are awake now, my child?”

Then memory came rushing back, and though the immediate past was still like a stormy dream I seemed to remember everything.

“Is it true that I saw. . . .”

“Yes,” said Mildred.

“Then he was not shipwrecked?”

“That was a false report.  Within a month or two the newspapers had contradicted it.”

“Where is he?” I asked, rising from my pillow.

“Hush!  Lie quiet.  You are not to excite yourself.  I must call the doctor.”

Mildred was about to leave the room, but I could not let her go.

“Wait!  I must ask you something more.”

“Not now, my child.  Lie down.”

“But I must.  Dear Sister, I must.  There is somebody else.”

“You mean the baby,” said Mildred, in a low voice.

“Yes.”

“She has been found, and taken to the country, and is getting better rapidly.  So lie down, and be quiet,” said Mildred, and with a long breath of happiness I obeyed.

A moment afterwards I heard her speaking to somebody over the telephone (saying I had recovered consciousness and was almost myself again), and then some indistinct words came hack in the thick telephone voice like that of a dumb man shouting down a tunnel, followed by sepulchral peals of merry laughter.