Gave, swollen with
melted snow, and rolling on with a voice of thunder: the trees, under the
action of their sap, arraying themselves in a mantle of greenery, whilst
the crowds, once more returning, noisily invaded the sparkling Grotto,
whence they drove the little birds of heaven.

"Yes, yes," repeated Baron Suire, in a declining voice, "I spent some
most delightful winter days here all alone. I saw no one but a woman, who
leant against the railing to avoid kneeling in the snow. She was quite
young, twenty-five perhaps, and very pretty--dark, with magnificent blue
eyes. She never spoke, and did not even seem to pray, but remained there
for hours together, looking intensely sad. I do not know who she was, nor
have I ever seen her since."

He ceased speaking; and when, a couple of minutes later, Pierre,
surprised at his silence, looked at him, he perceived that he had fallen
asleep. With his hands clasped upon his belly, his chin resting on his
chest, he slept as peacefully as a child, a smile hovering the while
about his mouth. Doubtless, when he said that he spent the night there,
he meant that he came thither to indulge in the early nap of a happy old
man, whose dreams are of the angels. And now Pierre tasted all the charms
of the solitude. It was indeed true that a feeling of peacefulness and
comfort permeated the soul in this rocky nook. It was occasioned by the
somewhat stifling fumes of the burning wax, by the transplendent ecstasy
into which one sank amidst the glare of the tapers. The young priest
could no longer distinctly see the crutches on the roof, the votive
offerings hanging from the sides, the altar of engraved silver, and the
harmonium in its wrapper, for a slow intoxication seemed to be stealing
over him, a gradual prostration of his whole being. And he particularly
experienced the divine sensation of having left the living world, of
having attained to the far realms of the marvellous and the superhuman,
as though that simple iron railing yonder had become the very barrier of
the Infinite.

However, a slight noise on his left again disturbed him. It was the
spring flowing, ever flowing on, with its bird-like warble. Ah! how he
would have liked to fall upon his knees and believe in the miracle, to
acquire a certain conviction that that divine water had gushed from the
rock solely for the healing of suffering humanity. Had he not come there
to prostrate himself and implore the Virgin to restore the fa