"She is very ill--very seriously ill, and she wishes to see you.
Therefore you are to go home immediately."
The tears sprang to my eyes, and the Reverend Mother drew me to her side
and laid my head on her breast and comforted me, saying my dear mother
had lived the life of a good Christian and could safely trust in the
redeeming blood of our Blessed Saviour. But I thought she must have some
knowledge of the conditions of my life at home, for she told me that
whatever happened I was to come back to her.
"Tell your father you _wish_ to come back to me," she said, and then she
explained the arrangements that were being made for my journey.
I was to travel alone by the Paris express which left Rome at six
o'clock that evening. The Mother of the Novices was to put me in a
sleeping car and see that the greatest care would be taken of me until I
arrived at Calais, where Father Donovan was to meet the train and take
me home.
I cried a great deal, I remember, but everybody in the Convent was kind,
and when, of my own choice, I returned to the girls at recreation, the
sinister sense of dignity which by some strange irony of fate comes to
all children when the Angel of Death is hovering over them, came to me
also--poor, helpless innocent--and I felt a certain distinction in my
sorrow.
At five o'clock the omnibus of the Convent had been brought round to the
door, and I was seated in one corner of it, with the Mother of the
Novices in front of me, when Mildred Bankes came running breathlessly
downstairs to say that the Reverend Mother had given her permission to
see me off.
Half an hour later Mildred and I were sitting in a compartment of the
Wagon-Lit, while the Mother was talking to the conductor on the
platform.
Mildred, whose eyes were wet, was saying something about herself which
seems pitiful enough now in the light of what has happened since.
She was to leave the Convent soon, and before I returned to it she would
be gone. She was poor and an orphan, both her parents being dead, and if
she had her own way she would become a nun. In any case our
circumstances would be so different, our ways of life so far apart, that
we might never meet again; but if . . .
Before she had finished a bell rang on the platform, and a moment or two
afterwards the train slid out of the station.
Then for the first time I began to realise the weight of the blow that
had fallen on me. I was sitting alone in my big compartment, we were
running into the Campagna, the heavens were ablaze with the glory of the
sunset, which was like fields of glistening fire, but darkness seemed to
have fallen on all the world.