th. The people in the house where they
lived, were as kind as they knew how to be; but how little they knew about
kindness, and nothing about peace and quiet. She felt that she was a
burden to Rose, and she knew that Rose could never be any thing to her.
Those poor, sightless eyes shed tears of homesickness for Grace, and she
was sorely oppressed with the desire to be with her again and feel the
touch of those cool, quiet hands against her face and over her eyelids
that so often burned with pain, and to hear that voice, which was never
loud and harsh. But what could she do? This is what she did: With her own
hand, unaided, she wrote a letter to the Pope at Rome, and gave it with a
piece of silver to an honest house-maid, who carried it to her priest for
proper direction, which he wrote upon it, marveling much when he read her
earnest words of entreaty, begging the Pope to please send back her Sister
Grace from the convent, because she was a little girl, "blind, helpless
and very lonely."

The Pope may be infallible, but he is surely human, for when he read the
simple words sprawled out upon a sheet of paper, blistered with the tears
of the little blind maid crying out from across the seas her appeal for
the return of her sister from those convent walls, he was moved to a
compassion which was not only priestly, but very human. He bestirred
himself in her behalf. He wrote letters to the convent of those Carmelite
nuns. He made earnest inquiry about Grace, and finally, after many days of
weary, heart-sick waiting, a letter came to the parish priest for little
Mary. It was written by the Pope himself, and brought to the blind girl in
far-off America the greeting and the blessing of the great Roman Pontiff.
He told her in kindly words that she had asked what he was powerless to
grant; that he could not drive out her sister from the shelter of those
holy walls which she had so wisely chosen, and where she devoutly wished
to remain, and therein peacefully, prayerfully end her days, but that he
could send her there to the arms of that sister; that he could and would
gladly give her dispensation from the duties and the obligations of the
holy order; that she might do, as no other had ever done, live among the
Carmelites and yet not be a Carmelite. "Go," he wrote, "little blind maid,
and have quickly gratified the wish of your heart. No holy vows, no robes
of the order need be yours. Your sister can not come to you, but you may
go