murmured: "Ah! how happy Blanche would be to see all these marvels."

She was thinking of her sister, who had been left in Paris to all the
worries of her hard profession as a teacher forced to run hither and
thither giving lessons. And that simple mention of her sister, of whom
Marie had not spoken since her arrival at Lourdes, but whose figure now
unexpectedly arose in her mind's eye, sufficed to evoke a vision of all
the past.

Then, without exchanging a word, Marie and Pierre lived their childhood's
days afresh, playing together once more in the neighbouring gardens
parted by the quickset hedge. But separation came on the day when he
entered the seminary and when she kissed him on the cheeks, vowing that
she would never forget him. Years went by, and they found themselves
forever parted: he a priest, she prostrated by illness, no longer with
any hope of ever being a woman. That was their whole story--an ardent
affection of which they had long been ignorant, then absolute severance,
as though they were dead, albeit they lived side by side. They again
beheld the sorry lodging whence they had started to come to Lourdes after
so much battling, so much discussion--his doubts and her passionate
faith, which last had conquered. And it seemed to them truly delightful
to find themselves once more quite alone together, in that dark nook on
that lovely night, when there were as many stars upon earth as there were
in heaven.

Marie had hitherto retained the soul of a child, a spotless soul, as her
father said, good and pure among the purest. Stricken low in her
thirteenth year, she had grown no older in mind. Although she was now
three-and-twenty, she was still a child, a child of thirteen, who had
retired within herself, absorbed in the bitter catastrophe which had