think of it, she who for three years had not even been able to wear a
slipper.

Pierre, who had become grave, waxing pale with the secret uneasiness
which was penetrating him, continued to look at her. And he also asked
her other questions. She was certainly not lying, and he merely suspected
a slow distortion of the actual truth, an easily explained embellishment
of the real facts amidst all the joy she felt at being cured and becoming
an important little personage. Who now knew if the cicatrisation of her
injuries, effected, so it was asserted, completely, instantaneously, in a
few seconds, had not in reality been the work of days? Where were the
witnesses?

Just then Madame de Jonquiere began to relate that she had been at the
hospital at the time referred to. "Sophie was not in my ward," said she,
"but I had met her walking lame that very morning--"

Pierre hastily interrupted the lady-hospitaller. "Ah! you saw her foot
before and after the immersion?"

"No, no! I don't think that anybody was able to see it, for it was bound
round with bandages. She told you that the bandages had fallen into the
piscina." And, turning towards the child, Madame de Jonquiere added, "But
she will show you her foot--won't you, Sophie? Undo your shoe."

The girl took off her shoe, and pulled down her stocking, with a
promptness and ease of manner which showed how thoroughly accustomed she
had become to it all. And she not only stretched out her foot, which was
very clean and very white, carefully tended indeed, with well-cut, pink
nails, but complacently turned it so that the young priest might examine