elf happy. Where's the use in your adding
to it, and making an old vain man so much vainer? Tell me about what is
nearest to your heart to-day."

Thus soberized, she gave me a fairly consecutive account of what had
happened. I say "fairly," because, of course, there were many
exclamations, and notes of interrogation, and "asides," which I let pass
without comment.

Ormsby had paid the suffering child a visit that morning, and had put
his final theses and difficulties before her. Disbeliever in miracles,
he was face to face with a miracle. That such an awful affliction as
befell Alice should be accepted, not only with resignation, but with
joy; that she would consider it a positive misfortune to be restored to
her old beauty, and that she was forever thanking God that He had
elected her to suffering, was either of two things--insanity or
inspiration. And her faith in the supernatural--her intense realization
of the existence and the daily, hourly influence of our Lord and His
Blessed Mother, and her profound conviction that one day her physical
shame and torment would intensify her glory in Heaven--all this struck
him as a revelation, before which the antics of spiritualists, and the
foreknowledge of Brahmins, and the blank agnosticism of science paled
into contemptible insignificance.

Bittra, as usual, had been speaking to Mrs. Moylan in the kitchen.
Sitting on the straw chair, she spoke for the hundredth time her words
of consolation to the poor mother. The murmur of voices came clear, but
indistinct, from the little chamber of the sick girl. Then, after a
long conference, Ormsby came out, grave and collected as usual, and
Bittra having said good by to the mother, and kissed the leprous face of
the sick girl, they both walked on in silence, until they came to the
bridge that spanned the fiord near the "great house." Ormsby leaned on
the parapet of the bridge looking out over the tumbling waters for a
long time. Then, turning, he said:--

"Bittra, I _must_ become a Catholic."

Then Bittra put her hand in his gloved palm, and that was all.

"And was that all?" I exclaimed incredulously.

"That's all," said Bittra, "and wasn't it enough?"

"That's not the way a novelist would wind up such a delightful romance,"
I said. "There would have been at least twenty or thirty pages of lurid
description."

"Ah! but this is not a romance," said Bittra; "this is stern reality."

And she tried ineffectually to frown.

"