iraculous baths of Lourdes didn't cure poor Marie Tremplin of her
tuberculosis, I can't say that what Beatrix assures me she knows about
the Deity isn't so! It appears to me quite incapable of demonstration,
but maybe it all happened as she says. Only I don't believe with her
that she _knows_ it. I say she _believes_ it. If it helps her, as she
says it does, to be the good and lovely girl she is, all right. It
might help Parrott to stand straight to think he was Napoleon. All
right."

"That's pragmatism," I suggested.

"Oh, well," he said, with one of his curious old smiles, "they call it
different things different years, I suppose."

He drew himself up, and I could see something was coming.

"Now, aunty, attend to me. I couldn't put Beatrix in an asylum for
what I and many, many others consider _her_ delusion, could I?"

"Why, Will, of course not!"

"No, nor Marie Tremplin."

"Equally of course not. She has a right to her miracle, legally, I
suppose, as well as Beatrix."

"Precisely. Well, here comes along Absolom Vail, and says _he's_ had a
miracle, too. He hasn't millions of people behind him, like Beatrix,
nor thousands like Marie, nor even half a dozen, as our old Esther
had--she converted all the servants and us children. He has only
one--himself. A poor miracle, perhaps, but his own. And Barkington
lands him in an asylum. The day of miracles is over."

"Why, Will! Why, Will..." I murmured. I seemed to feel myself on the
edge of something very big and cloudy and confusing, but very
necessary, somehow, to be understood. The trap he had led me into so
neatly had fastened softly, but with almost an actual click, upon me.

"What--what _is_ his miracle?" I inquired, in a subdued voice. I was
beginning to feel a little afraid of this boy of ours.

"I had hoped he'd tell you himself. He will, if you ask him.... We
ought to go and dress, oughtn't we?"

There was no more to be got out of him that night: he was passionately
fond of music and had no mind to lose the prelude to _Tristan_.

But through all that evening the big, shadowy something he had stirred
up in my mind grew and grew and troubled me increasingly.

"A poor miracle, but his own..." it haunted me. I went up with him
again in two days' time, as he had expected me to, I have no doubt.

In the little room with the gold fish and the Franklin grate everything
was the same except that the piled linen on the table was new: it w