“Not so unhappy there as you will be if you remain in the world and carry out your intention,” said the Reverend Mother.  “Oh believe me, my child, I know you better than you know yourself.  If you marry again, you will never be able to forget that you have broken your vow.  Other women may forget it—­frivolous women—­women living in society and devoting their lives to selfish pleasures.  Such women may divorce their husbands, or be divorced by them, and then marry again, without remembering that they are living in a state of sin, whatever the civil law may say—­open and wicked and shameless sin.  But you will remember it, and it will make you more unhappy than you have ever been in your life before.”

“Worse than that,” she continued, after a moment, “it will make your husband unhappy also.  He will see your remorse, and share it, because he will know he has been the cause.  If he is a good man the mere sight of your grief will torture him.  The better man he is the more will he suffer.  If you were a runaway nun he would wish to take you back to your convent, for though it might tear his heart out to part with you, he would want to restore your soul.  But being a wife who has broken her marriage vows he will never be able to do anything.  An immense and awful shadow will stand between you and darken every hour of your lives that is left.”

When the Reverend Mother had done I sat motionless and speechless, with an aching and suffocating heart, staring down on the garden over which the night was falling.

After a while she patted my cold hand and got up to go, saying she would call early in the morning to bid me good-bye.  Her visit to Ireland would not last longer than three weeks, and after that she might come back for me, if I felt on reflection (she was sure I should) that I ought to return with her to Rome.

I did not reply.  Perhaps it was partly because I was physically weak that my darling’s warning was so nearly overcome.  But the moment the door closed on the Reverend Mother a conviction of the truth of what she had said rushed upon me like the waves of an overflowing sea.

Yet how cruel!  After all our waiting, all our longing, all our gorgeous day-dreams of future happiness!  When I was going to be a bride, a happy bride, with my lost and stolen girlhood coming back to me!

For the second time a dark and frowning mountain had risen between Martin and me.  Formerly it had been my marriage—­now it was my God.

But if God forbade my marriage with Martin what was I to do?  What was left in life for me?  Was there anything left?

I was sitting with both hands over my face, asking myself these questions and struggling with a rising tempest of tears, when I heard baby crying in the room below, and Christian Ann hushing and comforting her.

“What’s doing on the boght, I wonder?”

A few minutes later they came upstairs, Isabel on her grandmother’s arm, in her nightdress, ready for bed.