torches to light him on his way.

I knew what it was--it was the Blessed Sacrament, which they were
bringing to my mother, and when Father Dan had come into the room,
saying "Peace be to this house," and laid a little white box on the
table, and thrown off his coat, he was wearing his priest's vestments
underneath.

Then the whole of my father's household--all except my father
himself--came into my mother's room, including Aunt Bridget, who sat
with folded arms in the darkness by the wall, and the servants, who
knelt in a group by the door.

Father Dan roused my mother by calling to her again, and after she had
opened her eyes he began to read. Sometimes his voice seemed to be
choked with sobs, as if the heart of the man were suffering, and
sometimes it pealed out loudly as if the soul of the priest were
inspiring him.

After Communion he gave my mother Extreme Unction--anointing the sweet
eyes which had seen no evil, the dear lips which had uttered no wrong,
and the feet which had walked in the ways of God.

All this time there was a solemn hush in the house like that of a
church--no sound within except my father's measured tread in the room
below, and none without except the muffled murmur which the sea makes
when it is far away and going out.

When all was over my mother seemed more at ease, and after asking for me
and being told I was in the cot, she said:

"You must all go and rest. Mary and I will be quite right now."

A few minutes afterwards my mother and I were alone once more, and then
she called me into her bed and clasped her arms about me and I lay with
my face hidden in her neck.

What happened thereafter seems to be too sacred to write of, almost too
sacred to think about, yet it is all as a memory of yesterday, while
other events of my life have floated away to the ocean of things that
are forgotten and lost.

"Listen, darling," she said, and then, speaking in whispers, she told me
she had heard all I had said about the Convent, and wondered if I would
not like to live there always, becoming one of the good and holy nuns.

I must have made some kind of protest, for she went on to say how hard
the world was to a woman and how difficult she had found it.

"Not that your father has been to blame--you must never think that,
Mary, yet still . . ."

But tears from her tender heart were stealing down her face and she had
to stop.

Even yet I had not realised all that the solemn time foreboded,