"Anyhow, you'll see and hear for yourself when you reach home, and then
perhaps you'll. . . ."
I answered that I should have to do what my father desired, being a
girl, and therefore. . . .
"But surely a girl has some rights of her own," he said, and then I was
silent and a little ashamed, having a sense of female helplessness
which I had never felt before and could find no words for.
"I'll write to your father," he said, and just at that moment the bell
rang, and my father came into the compartment, saying:
"Now then, young man, if you don't want to be taken up to the North Pole
instead of going down to the South one. . . ."
"That's all right, sir. Don't you trouble about _me_. I can take care of
myself," said Martin.
Something in his tone must have said more than his words to my father
and the Bishop, for I saw that they looked at each 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. . . .