rom his cross."

"And what about your own troubles, Alice?" said Bittra. "Is the healing
process going on?"

"Yes, indeed, thank God," she replied, "except here and there."

Bittra was watching me curiously. Now it is quite a certain fact, but I
never dreamed of attaching any importance to it, that this child had
recovered her perfect health, so far as that dreadful scrofulous
affection extended, except in the palms of her hands and the soles of
her feet, where there remained, to the doctor's intense disappointment,
round, angry sores, about the size of a half-crown, and each surrounded
with a nimbus of raw, red flesh, which bled periodically.

"And here, also," she said innocently this evening, "here on my side is
a raw sore which sometimes is very painful and bleeds copiously. I have
not shown the doctor that; but he gets quite cross about my hands and
feet."

"It is very curious," I said, in my own purblind fashion, "but I suppose
the extremities heal last."

"I shall walk home with you, Father Dan, if you have no objection," said
Bittra.

"Come along, child," I replied. "Now, Alice, we shall be watching
Monday, All Souls' Day."

"Very well, Daddy Dan," she said, smiling. "Everything will come right,
as we shall see."

As we walked through the village, Bittra said to me wonderingly:--

"Isn't it curious about those sores, Father? They won't heal."

"It is," I said musingly.

"I have been thinking a lot about it," she said.

"And the result of your most wise meditations?"

"You'll laugh at me."

"Never. I never laugh. I never allow myself to pass beyond the genteel
limits of a smile."

"Then I think--but--"

"Say it out, child. What are you thinking of?"

"I think it is the _stigmata_," she said, blushing furiously.

I was struck silent. It was too grand. Could it be? Had we a real,
positive saint amongst us?

"What do you think, Father Dan? Are you angry?"

"God forbid, child. But tell me, have you spoken to Alice on the
matter?"

"Oh, dear no! I wouldn't dream of such a thing. It would give her an
awful shock."

"Well, we'll keep it a profound secret, and await further revelations.
'Abscondisti haec a prudentibus, et revelasti ea parvulis.'"

But next evening, I think I threw additional fervor into the _Laudate's_
and _Benedicite's_ at Lauds.

But as I looked at Father Letheby across the table in the lamplight, and
saw his drawn, sallow cheeks and sunken eyes, and the white patch of