t father-in-law's valet hadn't gone back on his
bargain. I never knew what that old monkey made on it, but Mrs. Ferrau
told me he was going to leave it to the Catholic church in Normandy,
where he was born. I hope it did some good.

I went up to Greenwich that summer with a little boy who had
tuberculosis of the spine (the sweetest little fellow, and so clever!)
and on one of my afternoons out with him I stopped at the old cottage
where the valet lived, just to ask after him. The woman there told me
he had passed away about ten days after I was there before.

"In the night?" I asked, more for something to say than any real reason.

"No, in his sleep, in the afternoon," she said. "He didn't sleep much
at night, after his young gentleman came, I noticed. He seemed to have
bad dreams. He'd be praying away and clicking those rosary beads half
the night, sometimes. But he went out easy, at the last. I learned a
little French when I was lady's maid to a party, once, so I could get
along pretty well with him. But I couldn't make out about those
dreams, exactly; they seemed to be about something brown, with its back
to him, on the bed. But he was pretty contented by day, when he was
awake; he kept telling me of all he was leaving to his church."

... When you think about it, it was queer, wasn't it?

THE MIRACLE

"And are they all really insane?"

He looked at me curiously.

"'Insane'?" he repeated, "'really'?"

He was very young, but very clever, and I had known his mother well and
listened to his letters from school many a time; she was intensely
proud of him.

"I tell you what it is, aunty," he began, selecting a cigarette with
the deft manual gesture of a born surgeon (he was only twelve years
younger than I, and his phenomenal record of almost impossible
accomplishment made him seem far older than his years; but we kept to
the habits of his perambulator days, when I had been tremendously
pleased with the title). "I tell you what it is, aunty--I'm hanged if
I know!"

He peered slit-eyed through the clouds of smoke, and I waited eagerly
for what would come; when his eyes took on that look the boy seemed to
me, frankly, inspired. Twenty-three years (he had finished Harvard at
nineteen) appeared so pitifully inadequate to account for him! One was
forced to the belief that he had directly inherited that marvelous
"intuition" of his: that it was actually part of his famous father's
experience--fo