o that she returned to
kneel, amongst the bushy eglantine, as in the days when the Gave was not
walled in by a monumental quay. And it was the old town that she visited
at twilight, when the cool, perfumed breezes came down from the
mountains, the old painted and gilded semi-Spanish church where she had
made her first communion, the old Asylum so full of suffering where
during eight years she had grown accustomed to solitude--all that poor,
innocent old town, whose every paving-stone awoke old affections in her
memory's depths.

And did Bernadette ever extend the pilgrimage of her dreams as far as
Bartres? Probably, at times when she sat in her invalid-chair and let
some pious book slip from her tired hands, and closed her eyes, Bartres
did appear to her, lighting up the darkness of her view. The little
antique Romanesque church with sky-blue nave and blood-red altar screens
stood there amidst the tombs of the narrow cemetery. Then she would find
herself once more in the house of the Lagues, in the large room on the
left, where the fire was burning, and where, in winter-time, such
wonderful stories were told whilst the big clock gravely ticked the hours
away. At times the whole countryside spread out before her, meadows
without end, giant chestnut-trees beneath which you lost yourself,
deserted table-lands whence you descried the distant mountains, the Pic
du Midi and the Pic de Viscos soaring aloft as airy and as rose-coloured
as dreams, in a paradise such as the legends have depicted. And
afterwards, afterwards came her free childhood, when she scampered off
whither she listed in the open air, her lonely, dreamy thirteenth year,
when with all the joy of living she wandered through the immensity of
nature. And now, too, perhaps, she again beheld herself roaming in the
tall grass among the hawthorn bushes beside the streams on a warm sunny
day in June. Did she not picture herself grown, with a lover of her own
age, whom she would have loved with all the simplicity and affection of
her heart? Ah! to be a child again, to be free, unknown, happy once more,
to love afresh, and to love differently! The vision must have passed
confusedly before her--a husband who worshipped her, children gaily
growing up around her, the life that everybody led, the joys and sorrows
that her own parents had known, and which her children would have had to
know in their turn. But little by little all vanished, and she again
found herself in her