after a quarter of an hour or
so I was kneeling at the grill, beneath the very image of Mary. After
making my thanksgiving, still standing on the other side, I blessed the
objects myself--strictly against all rules, I imagine--and came home to
breakfast; and before nine we were on our way.

We were all silent as we progressed slowly and carefully through the
crowded streets, seeing once more the patient _brancardiers_ and the
pitiful litters on their way to the _piscines_. I could not have
believed that I could have become so much attached to a place in three
summer days. As I have said before, everything was against it. There was
no leisure, no room to move, no silence, no sense of familiarity. All
was hot and noisy and crowded and dusty and unknown. Yet I felt that it
was such a home of the soul as I never visited before--of course it is a
home, for it is the Mother that makes the home.

We saw no more of the Grotto nor the churches nor the square nor the
statue. Our road led out in such a direction that, after leaving the
hotel, we had only commonplace streets, white houses, shops, hotels and
crowds; and soon we had passed from the very outskirts of the town, and
were beginning with quickening speed to move out along one of those
endless straight roads that are the glory of France's locomotion.

Yet I turned round in my seat, sick at heart, and pulled the blind that
hung over the rear window of the car. No, Lourdes was gone! There was
the ring of the eternal hills, blue against the blue summer sky, with
their shades of green beneath sloping to the valleys, and the rounded
bastions that hold them up. The Gave was gone, the churches gone, the
Grotto--all was gone. Lourdes might be a dream of the night.

No, Lourdes was not gone. For there, high on a hill, above where the
holy city lay, stood the cross we had seen first upon our entrance,
telling us that if health is a gift of God, it is not the greatest; that
the Physician of souls, who healed the sick, and without whom not one
sparrow falls to the ground, and not one pang is suffered, Himself had
not where to lay His head, and died in pain upon the Tree.

And even as I looked we wheeled a corner, and the cross was gone.

* * * * *

How is it possible to end such a story without bathos? I think it is not
possible, yet I must end it. An old French priest said one day at
Lourdes, to one of those with whom I travelled, that he feared