d
wherever I went I was a subject for congratulation and envy.

If there were moments of misgiving, when, like the cold wind out of a
tunnel, there came the memory of the Reverend Mother and the story she
had told me at Nemi, there were other moments when I felt quite sure
that, in marrying Lord Raa, I should be doing a self-sacrificing thing
and a kind of solemn duty.

One such moment was when Mr. Curphy, my father's advocate, who with his
clammy hands always made me think of an over-fatted fish, came to tell
him that, after serious legal difficulties, the civil documents had been
agreed to, for, after he had finished with my father, he drew me aside
and said, as he smoothed his long brown beard:

"You ought to be a happy girl, Mary. I suppose you know what you are
doing for your father? You are wiping out the greatest disappointment of
his life, and rectifying the cruelty--the inevitable cruelty--of the
law, when you were born a daughter after he had expected a son."

Another such moment was when the Bishop came, in his grand carriage, to
say that after much discussion he had persuaded his lordship to sign the
necessary declaration that all the children of our union, irrespective
of sex, should be brought up as Catholics, for taking me aside, as the
advocate had done the day before, he said, in his suave voice, fingering
his jewelled cross:

"I congratulate you, my child. Yours is a great and precious
privilege--the privilege of bringing back to the Church a family which
has been estranged from it for nineteen years."

At the end of a fortnight we signed the marriage settlement. The little
ceremony took place in the drawing-room of my father's house. My
intended husband, who had not been to see me in the meantime, brought
with him (as well as his trustee and lawyer) a lady and a gentleman.

The lady was his maiden aunt, Lady Margaret Anslem, a fair woman of
about forty, fashionably dressed, redolent of perfume, and (except to
me, to whom she talked quite amicably) rather reserved and haughty, as
if the marriage of her nephew into our family were a bitter pill which
she had compelled herself to swallow.

The gentleman was a tall young man wearing a very high collar and
cravat, and using a handkerchief with embroidered initials in the corner
of it. He turned out to be the Hon. Edward Eastcliff--the great friend
who, being rich enough to please himself, was about to marry the
professional beauty.

I noticed th