flinty path that she had erst claimed to tread in the footsteps of Holy
Monica.

How much the love of my father may still have swayed her I do not know.
But to me it seems that in what next she did there was more of duty, more
of penitence, more of reparation for the sin of having been a woman as God
made her, than of love. Indeed, I almost know this to be so. In delicate
health as she was, she bade her people prepare a litter for her, and so she
had herself carried into Piacenza, to the Church of St. Augustine. There,
having confessed and received the Sacrament, upon her knees before a minor
altar consecrated to St. Monica, she made solemn vow that if my father's
life was spared she would devote the unborn child she carried to the
service of God and Holy Church.

Two months thereafter word was brought her that my father, his recovery by
now well-nigh complete, was making his way home.

On the morrow was I born--a votive offering, an oblate, ere yet I had drawn
the breath of life.

It has oft diverted me to conjecture what would have chanced had I been
born a girl--since that could have afforded her no proper parallel. In the
circumstance that I was a boy, I have no faintest doubt but that she saw a
Sign, for she was given to seeing signs in the slightest and most natural
happenings. It was as it should be; it was as it had been with the Sainted
Monica in whose ways she strove, poor thing, to walk. Monica had borne a
son, and he had been named Augustine. It was very well. My name, too,
should be Augustine, that I might walk in the ways of that other Augustine,
that great theologian whose mother's name was Monica.