It was, I suppose, the only dramatic thing that she could think of, in a wet and dreary February, and I have no doubt at all that she did it on impulse. That is to say, she gave herself time to write an immensely long letter to my father--in which perhaps she set forth that view of herself which he never gave her adequate opportunity for putting into words--but she gave herself no time to pack up her things. She simply took her dressing-case, and I am sure that that was mostly filled with photographs in folding frames, and packets of letters tied up with ribbon, and little manuals of devotion heavily underscored in several places. Then she walked out of the house, and to the station, and eventually got to Assisi. And they traced her there almost at once, partly because she took no pains to cover up her tracks, and partly because my grandmother--who understood the processes of her mind--found a copy of a Life of St. Francis on the drawing-room sofa, face downwards, with one page all blistered, as though tears had fallen upon it. My father, for his part, found the long letter that no doubt told him how little he had understood a sensitive nature, and possibly to what point their life together had become intolerable. And this had the strange effect of making him resolve, and declare aloud, that nothing would induce him to try and get her back again. There must have been a stormy scene between him and my grandmother, who had all the conventionally moral instincts of her day, and was genuinely shocked and disturbed at her daughter’s abrupt and violent casting off of her obvious responsibilities. “For the child’s sake, at least, Robert ...” she must have repeated many times. (Neither she nor my mother ever understood the futility of repeating, again and again, words which had already failed of their appeal.) “A child whose mother can leave him, at four years old, is better without her.” “It was madness, Robert, but you know she’s not a wicked woman--my poor Mary. If you go and bring her back now, no one will ever know what has happened, and you can start a new life together, and try again.” “It would be useless.” “Don’t, don’t say that.” The tears must have been pouring down her old face by that time. “Oh, Robert, give her another chance. This will have been a lesson to her--won’t you forgive her and take her back?” Well, in the end she prevailed to a certain extent--that is to say, my father would not seek out the culprit himself, but he would allow grandmother to do so, and if she brought Mary home again properly repentant he would not refuse to receive her and give her the “chance” of starting their married life afresh. “For the boy’s sake.” My grandmother must have repeated that phrase a hundred times at least, and it was certainly her _pièce de resistance_ in the scene at Assisi with Mary.