lapsing into a state of
anguish. "_Mon Dieu_! what a long time we must still wait!"

Then her father helped her to lie down again in the narrow box, a kind of
wooden gutter, in which she had been living for seven years past. Making
an exception in her favour, the railway officials had consented to take
as luggage the two pairs of wheels which could be removed from the box,
or fitted to it whenever it became necessary to transport her from place
to place. Packed between the sides of this movable coffin, she occupied
the room of three passengers on the carriage seat; and for a moment she
lay there with eyes closed. Although she was three-and-twenty; her ashen,
emaciated face was still delicately infantile, charming despite
everything, in the midst of her marvellous fair hair, the hair of a
queen, which illness had respected. Clad with the utmost simplicity in a
gown of thin woollen stuff, she wore, hanging from her neck, the card
bearing her name and number, which entitled her to _hospitalisation_, or
free treatment. She herself had insisted on making the journey in this
humble fashion, not wishing to be a source of expense to her relatives,
who little by little had fallen into very straitened circumstances. And
thus it was that she found herself in a third-class carriage of the
"white train," the train which carried the greatest sufferers, the most
woeful of the fourteen trains going to Lourdes that day, the one in
which, in addition to five hundred healthy pilgrims, nearly three hundred
unfortunate wretches, weak to the point of exhaustion, racked by
suffering, were heaped together, and borne at express speed from one to
the other end of France.

Sorry that he had saddened her, Pierre continued to gaze at her with the
air of a compassionate elder brother. He had just completed his thirtieth
year, and was pale and slight, with a broad forehead. After busying
himself with all the arrangements for the journey, he had been desirous
of accompanying her, and, having obtained admission among the
Hospitallers of Our Lady of Salvation as an auxiliary member, wore on his
cassock the red, orange-tipped cross of a bearer. M. de Guersaint on his
side had simply pinned the little scarlet cross of the pilgrimage on his
grey cloth jacket. The idea of travelling appeared to delight him;
although he was over fifty he still looked young, and, with his eyes ever
wandering over the landscape, he seemed unable to keep his head still--a
bird