How I suffered at the sight of it! How time after time that night I leaned over my sleeping child to see if the mark had passed away! How again and again I knelt by her side to pray that if sin of mine had to be punished the punishment might fall on me and not on my innocent babe!
At last I remembered baby's baptism and told myself that if it meant anything it meant that the sin in which my child had been born, the sin of those who had gone before her (if sin it was), had been cast out of her soul with the evil spirits which had inspired them.
"This sign of the Holy Cross + which we make upon her forehead do thou, accursed devil, never dare to violate."
God's law had washed my darling white! What could man's law—his proud but puny morality—do to injure her? It could do nothing!
That comforted me. When I looked at baby again the flush had gone and I went to bed quite happy.
NINETY-FIRST CHAPTER
I think it must have been the morning of the next day when the nurse who had attended me in my confinement came to see how I was going along.
I told her of the dimness of my sight and the aching of my eyeballs, whereupon she held up her hands and cried:
"There now! What did I tell you? Didn't I say it is after a lady feels it?"