tense grief: "She did not cure
me."

And then Madame Vetu expired, very gently.

As though this were all that she had been waiting for, little Sophie
Couteau jumped from the bed quite satisfied, and went off to play with
her doll again at the far end of the ward. Neither La Grivotte, who was
finishing her bread, nor Elise Rouquet, busy with her mirror, noticed the
catastrophe. However, amidst the cold breath which seemingly swept by,
while Madame de Jonquiere and Madame Desagneaux--the latter of whom was
unaccustomed to the sight of death--were whispering together in
agitation, Marie emerged from the expectant rapture in which the
continuous, unspoken prayer of her whole being had plunged her so long.
And when she understood what had happened, a feeling of sisterly
compassion--the compassion of a suffering companion, on her side certain
of cure--brought tears to her eyes.

"Ah! the poor woman!" she murmured; "to think that she has died so far
from home, in such loneliness, at the hour when others are being born
anew!"

Ferrand, who, in spite of professional indifference, had also been
stirred by the scene, stepped forward to verify the death; and it was on
a sign from him that Sister Hyacinthe turned up the sheet, and threw it
over the dead woman's face, for there could be no question of removing
the corpse at that moment. The patients were now returning from the
Grotto in bands, and the ward, hitherto so calm, so full of sunshine, was
again filling with the tumult of wretchedness and pain--deep coughing and
feeble shuffling, mingled with a noisome smell--a pitiful display, in
fact, of well-nigh every human infirmity.

II. THE SERVICE AT THE GROTTO

ON that day, Monday, the crowd at the Grotto, was enormous. It was the
last day that the national pilgrimage would spend at Lourdes, and Father
Fourcade, in his morning address, had said that it would be necessary to
make a supreme effort of fervour and faith to obtain from Heaven all that
it might be willing to grant in the way of grace and prodigious cure. So,
from two o'clock in the afternoon, twenty thousand pilgrims were
assembled there, feverish, and agitated by the most ardent hopes. From
minute to minute the throng continued increasing, to such a point,
indeed, that Baron Suire became alarmed, and came out of the Grotto to
say to Berthaud: "My friend, we shall be overwhelmed, that's certain.
Double your squads, bring your men closer together."

The Hos