With that he went away and I saw no more of him until the steamer was drawing up at the landing stage at Liverpool, and then, while the passengers were gathering up their luggage, he came back with Father Dan, and the tall sallow man who was his guardian, and said:
"Going to give me that kiss to make amends, or are you to owe me a grudge for the rest of your life, my lady?"
"My little Mary couldn't owe a grudge to anybody," said Father Dan. "She'll kiss his lordship and make amends; I'm certain."
And then I did to the young Lord Raa what I had done to Aunt Bridget—I held up my face and he kissed me.
It was a little, simple, trivial incident, but it led with other things to the most lamentable fact of my life, and when I think of it I sometimes wonder how it comes to pass that He who numbers the flowers of the field and counts the sparrows as they fall has no handwriting with which to warn His children that their footsteps may not fail.
TWELFTH CHAPTER
Of our journey to Rome nothing remains to me but the memory of sleeping in different beds in different towns, of trains screaming through tunnels and slowing down in glass-roofed railway stations, of endless crowds of people moving here and there in a sort of maze, nothing but this, and the sense of being very little and very helpless and of having to be careful not to lose sight of Father Dan, for fear of being lost—until the afternoon of the fourth day after we left home.
We were then crossing a wide rolling plain that was almost destitute of trees, and looked, from the moving train, like green billows of the sea with grass growing over them. Father Dan was reading his breviary for the following day, not knowing what he would have to do in it, when the sun set in a great blaze of red beyond the horizon, and then suddenly a big round black ball, like a captive balloon, seemed to rise in the midst of the glory.
I called Father Dan's attention to this, and in a moment he was fearfully excited.