word, one after another up the narrow path, ending as black specks just
as they had come, and vanishing on the horizon.

"Those women have been two days and two nights crossing the mountains,"
said a priest, coming up to Durtal. "They started from the depths of
Savoy, and have travelled almost without rest to spend a few minutes
here; they will sleep to night in a cow-house or a cave, as chance may
direct, and to-morrow by daybreak they will start again on their
weariful way."

Durtal was overpowered by the radiant splendour of such faith.

It was possible, then, to find souls ever young, souls ever new, souls
as of undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not,
outside cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges,
and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who,
without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God,
while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious
elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these
women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle
ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless
ideas, hardly able to express themselves, hardly knowing how to read,
wept with love in the presence of the Inaccessible, whom they compelled
by their humility and single-heartedness to appear, to become actual to
their mind.

"Yes, it was but just that the Virgin should cherish them and choose
them above all others to be Her vessels of election.

"Yes. For they are unburdened with the dreadful weight of doubt, they