I did not sing very much that day, and I thought baby was rather restless.
Towards nightfall I had a startling experience.
I was preparing Isabel for bed, when I saw a red flush, like a rash, down the left side of her face.
At first I thought it would pass away, but when it did not I called my Welsh landlady upstairs to look at it.
"Do you see something like a stain on baby's face?" I asked, and then waited breathlessly for her answer.
"No . . . Yes . . . Well," she said, "now that thee'st saying so . . . perhaps it's a birthmark."
"A birthmark?"
"Did'st strike thy face against anything when baby was coming?"
I made some kind of reply, I hardly know what, but the truth, or what I thought to be the truth, flashed on me in a moment.
Remembering my last night at Castle Raa, and the violent scene which had occurred there, I told myself that the flush on baby's face was the mark of my husband's hand which, making no impression upon me, had been passed on to my child, and would remain with her to the end of her life, as the brand of her mother's shame and the sign of what had been called her bastardy.