ce as she
recovered consciousness, refused the broth with a gesture. She wished to
be left in quietness, she did not want anybody to question her. And it
was only when the others had gone off smiling at one another, that she
said to Pierre in a husky voice: "Has not my father come then?"

After hesitating for a moment the priest was obliged to confess the
truth. "I left him sleeping and he cannot have woke up."

Then Marie relapsed into her state of languid stupor and dismissed him in
his turn, with the gesture with which she declined all succour. She no
longer prayed, but remained quite motionless, gazing fixedly with her
large eyes at the marble Virgin, the white statue amidst the radiance of
the Grotto. And as four o'clock was now striking, Pierre with his heart
sore went off to the Verification Office, having suddenly remembered the
appointment given him by Doctor Chassaigne.

IV. VERIFICATION

THE doctor was waiting for the young priest outside the Verification
Office, in front of which a compact and feverish crowd of pilgrims was
assembled, waylaying and questioning the patients who went in, and
acclaiming them as they came out whenever the news spread of any miracle,
such as the restoration of some blind man's sight, some deaf woman's
hearing, or some paralytic's power of motion.

Pierre had no little difficulty in making his way through the throng, but
at last he reached his friend. "Well," he asked, "are we going to have a
miracle--a real, incontestable one I mean?"

The doctor smiled, indulgent despite his new faith. "Ah, well," said he,
"a miracle is not worked to order. God intervenes when He pleases."

Some hospitallers were mounting guard at the door, but they all knew M.
Chassaigne, and respectfully drew aside to let him enter with his
companion. The office where the cures were verified was very badly
installed in a wretched wooden shanty divided into two apartments, first
a narrow ante-chamber, and then a general meeting room which was by no
means so large as it should have been. However, there was a question of
providing the department with better accommodation the following year;
with which view some large premises, under one of the inclined ways of
the Rosary, were already being fitted up.

The only article of furniture in the antechamber was a wooden bench on
which Pierre perceived two female patients awaiting their turn in the
charge of a young hospitaller. But on entering the meeting