in order here."

So saying, he pointed to a stout, grey-haired man of forty, with a heavy
face and bull-dog jaw. Raboin was an ardent believer, one of those
excited beings who did not allow the miracles to be called in question.
And thus he often suffered from his duties at the Verification Office,
where he was ever ready to growl with anger when anybody disputed a
prodigy. The appeal to the doctors had made him quite lose his temper,
and his superior had to calm him.

"Come, Raboin, my friend, be quiet!" said Doctor Bonamy. "All sincere
opinions are entitled to a hearing."

However, the /defile/ of patients was resumed. A man was now brought in
whose trunk was so covered with eczema that when he took off his shirt a
kind of grey flour fell from his skin. He was not cured, but simply
declared that he came to Lourdes every year, and always went away feeling
relieved. Then came a lady, a countess, who was fearfully emaciated, and
whose story was an extraordinary one. Cured of tuberculosis by the
Blessed Virgin, a first time, seven years previously, she had
subsequently given birth to four children, and had then again fallen into
consumption. At present she was a morphinomaniac, but her first bath had
already relieved her so much, that she proposed taking part in the
torchlight procession that same evening with the twenty-seven members of
her family whom she had brought with her to Lourdes. Then there was a
woman afflicted with nervous aphonia, who after months of absolute
dumbness had just recovered her voice at the moment when the Blessed
Sacrament went by at the head of the four o'clock procession.

"Gentlemen," declared Doctor Bonamy, affecting the graciousness of a