"Mary Conrad, maiden name O'Neill, I presume?" he said.
I hesitated once more. The old temptation was surging back upon me. But making a great pull on my determination to tell the truth (or what I believed to be the truth) I answered:
"No, Mary O'Neill simply."
"Ah!" said the young clerk, and I thought his manner changed instantly.
There was silence for some minutes while the young clerk filled up his form and made the copy I was to carry away.
I heard the scratching of the young clerk's pen, the crinkling of the old man's newspaper, the hollow ticking of a round clock on the wall, the dull hum of the traffic in the streets, and the thud-thud-thudding in my own bosom.
Then the entry was read out to me and I was asked to sign it.
"Sign here, please," said the young clerk in quite a different tone, pointing to a vacant line at the bottom of the hook, and I signed with a trembling hand and a feeling of only partial consciousness.
I hardly know what happened after that until I was standing in the open vestibule, settling baby on my arm afresh for my return journey, and telling myself that I had laid a stigma upon my child which would remain with her as long as she lived.
It was a long, long way back, I remember, and when I reached home (having looked neither to the right nor left, nor at anything or anybody, though I felt as if everybody had been looking at me) I had a sense of dimness of sight and of aching in the eyeballs.