Was it six weeks or six months since I left that big town house, a disgraced and blighted little being? Time to a child is so unequal a matter. A month may seem a century, a year appear vaguer than a dream. Indeed, I have never yet been able to tell myself how long a space of time actually separated my good-bye to Kildare and my departure for England. Multiplied experiences combined to mislead me.

Simultaneously with the opening of the cab-door opened the big door of my stepfather\'s house, and a group of little golden heads showed in the dark frame. Feet and hands and voluble lips and eyes played together, and for a very brief while I enjoyed the sensations of a heroine.

This small world was excited prospectively at the thought of my coming adventures. I was soon to represent to them the unknown, the elsewhere, the eternal dream of "far fair foreign lands." Things were to happen to me that never[Pg 108] yet happened to mortal. I was to be snubbed by and to subdue a haughty people. Perhaps if I did something extremely outrageous I should be put into prison, with chains round my feet and wrists. Pending which, I was to travel for several hours by land and several hours by water.

"She has come already," they shouted gleefully. "Oh, such a dreadful person, Angela! taller than papa, and the skin is quite tight round her eyes and mouth as if she couldn\'t laugh."

She was, indeed, an odd-looking woman, the jailer to whom my parents so unconcernedly confided me. Not unkind, but austere and grotesque in her black cap and long black veil. She had left a Tipperary village to become a lady of Mercy in the English convent, and to her was intrusted the care of my deported self. In religion her name was Sister Clare, and the impression she has left on me is that of an inoffensive policeman masquerading in woman\'s attire, with limbs too long for a decorous management of them, honest, cold blue eyes, and, instead of the vivid hues of life upon the lean cheek, discoloured parchment drawn without a wrinkle tightly over the high-boned impassible visage.

I had the bad taste to show fright upon sight[Pg 109] of her lugubrious garb of postulant, and like the little savage I was, passionately declined her proffered kiss; but when my stepfather held me on his knees beside her, and spoke to her with his charming affability, I let myself be coaxed into equable endurance of the queer picture. I saw then that she was not dangerous. Indulgence lurked beneath the austere expression, and if the glance was cold, it was neither hard nor cruel.

Up-stairs in the nursery the hours passed tumultuously in a frenzy of discussion. Each little head was busy forging its theory of deportment and action in circumstances so strange and adventurous as those of a baby girl going out alone among the sharks and foreigners of a cold undreamed-of world. The immediate fear was that I should disgrace my land by my Kildare accent. My eldest sister contemptuously declared that I talked "just like that disgusting little ............