re closely at the saint. He
was just wood, inanimate and insensible, and there was still no sign.
Outside, I knew, a crowd of pilgrims was already gathered. They were
waiting, poor souls. But what was their waiting compared with mine?

Another hour I knelt there, still beseeching Heaven to take mercy
upon me. But Heaven remained unresponsive and the wounds of the image
continued dry.

I rose, at last, in a sort of despair, and going to the door of the hut,
I flung it wide.

The platform was filled with a great crowd of peasantry, and an overflow
poured down the sides of it and surged up the hill on the right and the
left. At sight of me, so gaunt and worn, my eyes wild with despair and
feverish from sleeplessness, a tangled growth of beard upon my hollow
cheeks, they uttered as with one voice a great cry of awe. The multitude
swayed and rippled, and then with a curious sound as that of a great
wind, all went down upon their knees before me--all save the array of
cripples huddled in the foreground, brought thither, poor wretches, in
the hope of a miraculous healing.

As I was looking round upon that assembly, my eyes were caught by a
flash and glitter on the road above us leading to the Cisa Pass. A
little troop of men-at-arms was descending that way. A score of them
there would be, and from their lance-heads fluttered scarlet bannerols
bearing a white device which at that distance I could not make out.

The troop had halted, and one upon a great black horse, a man whose
armour shone like the sun itself, was pointing down with his mail-clad
hand. Then they began to move again, and the brightness of their armour,
the fluttering pennons on their lances, stirred me strangely in that
fleeting moment, ere I turned again to the faithful who knelt there
waiting for my words. Dolefully, with hanging head and downcast eyes, I
made the dread announcement.

"My children, there is yet no miracle."

A deathly stillness followed the words. Then came an uproar, a clamour,
a wailing. One bold mountaineer thrust forward to the foremost ranks,
though without rising from his knees.

"Father," he cried, "how can that be? The saint has never failed to
bleed by dawn on Holy Thursday, these five years past."

"Alas!" I groaned, "I do not know. I but tell you what is. All night
have I held vigil. But all has been vain. I will go pray again, and do
you, too, pray."

I dared not tell them of my growing suspicion and fear that the faul