She kissed me on both cheeks, not in the fleshless kiss of the nun, but with dear human warmth of lips, and her fingers lingered tenderly about my head. Did she suspect the sacrifice I had made to her kindness?--the fierce and wrathful words I had projected to hurl at the head of the superioress, and that I had kept back to please her? At the Ivies I maintained a steadfast silence upon what had happened. I cannot now trace the obscure reasons of my silence, which must have pleased the nuns, for nobody ever knew about my severe whipping. Thanks to the beneficent influences of my new friend, I was for a while a model of all the virtues. I studied hard, absorbed pages of useful knowledge in the "Child's Guide," and mastered the abstruse contents of Cardinal Wiseman's "History of England." At the end of a month, to the amazement of everybody and to my own dismay, I was rewarded with a medal of good conduct, and formally enrolled in that virtuous body, the Children of the Angels, and wore a medal attached to a brilliant green ribbon. This transient period of grace, felt no doubt by all around me to be precarious and unstable, was deemed the fitting moment for my first confession. What a baby of eight can have to confess I know not. The value of such an institution for the infantine conscience escapes me. But there can be no question of its enormous sensational interest for us all. Two new children had made their appearance since my tempestuous arrival. They belonged to the band, as well as an idiot girl two years older than I, and now deemed wise enough to crave pardon for sins she could not possibly commit. We carefully studied the "Examination of Conscience," and spelt out the particularly big words with a thrill: they looked nice mysterious sins, the sort of crimes we felt we would gladly commit if we had the chance. I went about sombre and dejected, under the conviction that I must have sinned the sin against the Holy Ghost, and Polly Evans wondered if adultery figured upon the list of her misdoings. She was sure, however, that she had not defrauded the labourer of his daily wage, whatever that might be, for the simple reason that she had never met a labourer. I was tortured with a fresh sensational doubt. My foster-mother's cousin at Kildare was a very nice labourer who often had given me sweets. Could I, in a moment of temporary aberration, have defrauded him of his wage? And then adultery! If Polly was sure she had committed adultery, might I not also have so deeply offended against heaven? I had not precisely killed anybody, but had I not desired to kill Sister Esmeralda the day I threw the stool at her?