ch other with surprise.

Then the bell rang again, the engine throbbed, and Martin said,
"Good-bye! Good-bye!"

While the train moved out of the station he stood bareheaded on the
platform with such a woebegone face that looking back at him my throat
began to hurt me as it used to do when I was a child.

I was very sad that day as we travelled north. My adopted country had
become dear to me during my ten years' exile from home, and I thought I
was seeing the last of my beautiful Italy, crowned with sunshine and
decked with flowers.

But there was another cause of my sadness, and that was the thought of
Martin's uneasiness about my marriage the feeling that if he had
anything to say to my father he ought to have said it then.

And there was yet another cause of which I was quite unconscious--that
like every other girl before love dawns on her, half of my nature was
still asleep, the half that makes life lovely and the world dear.

To think that Martin Conrad was the one person who could have wakened my
sleeping heart! That a word, a look, a smile from him that day could
have changed the whole current of my life, and that. . . .

But no, I will not reproach him. Have I not known since the day on St.
Mary's Rock that above all else he is a born gentleman?

And yet. . . . And yet. . . .

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

And yet I was a fool, or in spite of everything I should have spoken to
Daniel O'Neill before he left Rome. I should have said to him:

"Do you know that the man to whom you are going to marry your daughter
is a profligate and a reprobate? If you _do_ know this, are you
deliberately selling her, body and soul, to gratify your lust of rank
and power and all the rest of your rotten aspirations?"

That is what I ought to have done, but didn't do. I was afraid of being
thought to have personal motives--of interfering where I wasn't wanted,
of butting in when I had no right.

Yet I felt I _had_ a right, and I had half a mind to throw up everything
and go back to Ellan. But the expedition was the big chance I had been
looking forward to and I could not give it up.

So I resolved to write. But writing isn't exactly my job, and it took me
a fortnight to get anything done to my satisfaction. By that time we
were at Port Said, and from there I posted three letters,--the first to
Daniel O'Neill, the second to Bishop Walsh, the third to Father Dan.

Would they reach in time? If so, would they be rea