w Penelope
has been restored to her normal condition of mind, but that normal
condition includes a strong inherited and developed tendency
towards--certain things,"--my cheeks burn with shame as I write this.
"How do I know that this tendency in her, even if she remains herself,
will not make trouble again--for both of us?"

How could Christopher be sure about this?

_He could not be sure!_

So I did right to leave him.

CHAPTER XX

THE MIRACLE

(_From Penelope's Diary_)

_Lourdes. A Week Later._

Today, with a multitude of the afflicted, I bathed in the _piscine_, a
long trough filled with holy water from the grotto. The water was cold
and not very clean (for hours it had received bodies carrying every
disease known to man), but as I lay there, wrapped in a soaking apron
and immersed to the head, I felt an indescribable peace possessing my
soul. Was it the two priests who held my hands and encouraged me with
kindly eyes? Was it the shouts and rejoicings, the continual prayers of
pilgrims all about me? Or was it a sudden overwhelming sense of my own
unworthiness, of my ingratitude and lack of faith and a rush of new
desire to begin my life all over again, to forget my selfish repining?
Whatever it was I know that as I arose from the bath and bowed before
the statue of the Blessed Virgin, I was caught by a spiritual fervor
that seemed to lift me in breathless ecstasy.

A young woman who was blind stood beside me, splashing water from a hand
basin upon her reddened, sightless eyelids, and praying desperately.
Together with her I prayed as I never had prayed, crying the words
aloud, over and over again, as she did, while tears poured down my
cheeks:

"_Oh, Marie, concue sans peche, priez pour nous qui avons recours a
vous!_"

As I came away and started back to the _Bureau_, walking slowly under
the blazing Pyrenees sun, I knew that an extraordinary change had taken
place in me. I was not the same woman any more. I would never again be
the same woman. I was like the child I knew about that had been
miraculously cured of infantile paralysis; or like the widow I had
spoken to who had been miraculously cured of a fistula in the arm that
had been five times vainly operated upon; or like the old woman I had
seen who had been miraculously cured of an "incurable" tumor that had
caused her untold suffering for twenty-two years. I was a _miraculee_,
like these others, hundreds of others, one more case that wo