four. With her nose contracted, her eyelids lowered and showing blue in
her waxen face, the child was unable to speak, unable to give utterance
to more than a low plaint, a gentle moan, which rent the heart of her
mother, leaning over her, each time that she heard it.

"Would she eat a few grapes?" timidly asked the lady, who had hitherto
preserved silence. "I have some in my basket."

"Thank you, madame," replied the woman, "she only takes milk, and
sometimes not even that willingly. I took care to bring a bottleful with
me."

Then, giving way to the desire which possesses the wretched to confide
their woes to others, she began to relate her story. Her name was
Vincent, and her husband, a gilder by trade, had been carried off by
consumption. Left alone with her little Rose, who was the passion of her
heart, she had worked by day and night at her calling as a dressmaker in
order to bring the child up. But disease had come, and for fourteen
months now she had had her in her arms like that, growing more and more
woeful and wasted until reduced almost to nothingness. She, the mother,
who never went to mass, entered a church, impelled by despair to pray for
her daughter's cure; and there she had heard a voice which had told her
to take the little one to Lourdes, where the Blessed Virgin would have
pity on her. Acquainted with nobody, not knowing even how the pilgrimages
were organised, she had had but one idea--to work, save up the money
necessary for the journey, take a ticket, and start off with the thirty
sous remaining to her, destitute of all supplies save a bottle of milk
for the child, not having even thought of purchasing a crust of bread for
herself.