which a maid was already placing
the luggage. Pity came to all who beheld the unhappy woman, for she did
not seem to have awakened from her prostration during her three days'
sojourn at Lourdes. What she had been when they had removed her from the
carriage on the morning of her arrival, that she also was now when the
bearers were about to place her inside it again--clad in lace, covered
with jewels, still with the lifeless, imbecile face of a mummy slowly
liquefying; and, indeed, one might have thought that she had become yet
more wasted, that she was being taken back diminished, shrunken more and
more to the proportions of a child, by the march of that horrible disease
which, after destroying her bones, was now dissolving the softened fibres
of her muscles. Inconsolable, bowed down by the loss of their last hope,
her husband and sister, their eyes red, were following her with Abbe
Judaine, even as one follows a corpse to the grave.

"No, no! not yet!" said the old priest to the bearers, in order to
prevent them from placing the box in the carriage. "She will have time
enough to roll along in there. Let her have the warmth of that lovely sky
above her till the last possible moment."

Then, seeing Pierre near him, he drew him a few steps aside, and, in a
voice broken by grief, resumed: "Ah! I am indeed distressed. Again this
morning I had a hope. I had her taken to the Grotto, I said my mass for
her, and came back to pray till eleven o'clock. But nothing came of it;
the Blessed Virgin did not listen to me. Although she cured me, a poor,
useless old man like me, I could not obtain from her the cure of this
beautiful, young, and wealthy woman, whose life ought to be a continual
_fete_. Undoubtedly the Blessed Virgin knows what she ought to do better
than ourselves, and I bow and bless her name. Nevertheless, my soul is
full of frightful sadness."

He did not tell everything; he did not confess the thought which was
upsetting him, simple, childish, worthy man that he was, whose life had
never been troubled by either passion or doubt. But his thought was that
those poor weeping people, the husband and the sister, had too many
millions, that the presents they had brought were too costly, that they
had given far too much money to the Basilica. A miracle is not to be
bought. The wealth of the world is a hindrance rather than an advantage
when you address yourself to God. Assuredly, if the Blessed Virgin had
turned a deaf ear