discussion. However, theological discussion being forced upon her, she had no mind to give way. Motherless from her childhood, Nancy Howard had never been trained in the purely feminine grace of suppressing her opinions.
“I not only have eyes; but I have a little common sense,” she answered aggressively.
The next instant, she was conscious of a sudden wave of contrition. Madame Gagnier unclasped her wrinkled hands and crossed herself devoutly.
“Then may the Good Sainte Anne open your eyes!” she responded, with gentle simplicity. “You carry her name. Pray that she take you under her protection, and work this miracle in your behalf. She is all-gracious, and her goodness has not any limits at all.”
Impulsively the girl rose from her seat on the ground, crossed to the stile and dropped down on its lowest step.
“Madame Gagnier, I was very rude,” she said, with equal simplicity.
Then silence dropped over them, the silence of the country and of the past. Forgetful of the letter she had let slip to the ground, forgetful of the coarse, mannish boots beside her own dainty ties, the girl allowed her gaze to wander back and forth across the view. It had grown so familiar to her during the last nine days, interminable days to the energetic, society-loving American girl who had chafed at her exile from the early gayeties of the awakening season in town.
Fifty feet away stood her temporary prison, a long, narrow stone house coated with shining white plaster. Above its single story, the pointed roof shot up sharply, broken by two dormer windows and topped with a chimney at either end, the one of stone, the other of brick. The palings in front of the house were white, dotted with their dark green posts; but, the house once passed, the neat palings promptly degenerated into a post-and-rail fence guiltless of paint and crossed with a stile at important strategic points connected with the barn. For one hundred feet in front of the house, the smooth-cropped lawn rolled gently downward. Then it dropped sharply from the crest of the bluff in an almost perpendicular grassy wall reaching down to the single long street of Beaupré, two hundred feet below. The crest of the bluff was dotted by an occasional farmhouse, each reached by its zigzag trail up the slope; but, in the street beneath, the houses met in two continuous, unbroken lines, parallel to that other continuous line of the mighty river. The river was mud-colored, to-day; and the turf about her was browned by early frosts; but the Isle of Orleans lay blue in the middle distance, and, far to the north, Cap Tourmente rested in a purple haze. At her feet, the white sail of a stray fishing-boat caught the sunlight and tossed it back to her, and, nearer still, the gray twin spires of Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré rose in the clear October air.
“Mother of the Holy Virgin, protector of sailors, healer of the faithful, patron saint of the New France.” Dame Gagnier was rehearsing the attributes of the saint to herself in her own harsh patois.
The girl interrupted her ruthlessly.
“What an enormous train!” she exclaimed.
“Eh?”
Nancy pointed to the long line of cars crawling up to the station beside the church.
“Long train. Many cars,” she explained slowly.
Dame Gagnier’s eyes followed the pointing finger.
“Yes. It is a pilgrimage,” she answered.
The girl scrambled to her feet.
“Really? A pilgrimage! I thought it was too late in the season. Do you suppose there will be a miracle?” she questioned eagerly.
Under the wide hat, the eyes lighted and the wrinkled lips puckered into a smile.
“Mam’selle does not believe in those miracle,” Madame Gagnier reminded her.
Nancy’s shoulders shaped themselves into an American travesty of the inimitable French shrug.
“I am always open to conviction,” she announced calmly.
“Eh?”
“I am going to see for myself.”
“Mam’selle will go to church?”
“Yes; that is, if you are sure it is a pilgrimage.”
“What else?” In her turn, Madame Gagnier pointed to the train whence a stream of humanity was pouring into the square courtyard of the Basilica.
“You are sure? I don’t want to break my neck for nothing, scrambling down your ancestral driveway.”
“Eh?”
For the thousandth time during the past nine days, Nancy felt an unreasoning rage against the deliberate monosyllable that checked her whimsical talk. In time, it becomes annoying to be obliged to explain all one’s figures of speech. Abruptly she pulled herself up and began again.
“Unless you are sure it is a pilgrimage, I do not wish to walk down the steep slope,” she amended.
“Yes. It is a pilgrimage from Lake Saint John. My son told me. It is the last pilgrimage of the year.”
Nancy clasped her hands in rapture.
“Glory be!” she breathed fervently. “I am in great luck, to-day, for they said that it was too late in the year to expect any more of them. The Good Sainte Anne is working in my behalf. Now, if she will only produce a miracle, I’ll be quite content. Good by, Madame Gagnier!”
Madame Gagnier nodded, as she looked after the alert, erect figure.
“Mam’selle does not believe in those miracle,” she said calmly. “Well, she shall see.”
The girl stooped to pick up her letters. Then swiftly she crossed the lawn and entered the house. Outside a closed door, she paused and tapped softly.
“Come in.” The answering voice was impersonal, abstracted.
Pushing open the door, Nancy entered the little sitting-room and crossed to the desk by the sunny window looking out on the river.
“Daddy dear, are you going to come with me, for an hour or two?”
The figure before the desk lost its scholarly abstraction and came back to the present. The student of antiquity had changed to the adoring father of a most modern sort of American girl; and his eyes, leaving the musty ecclesiastical records, brightened with a wholly worldly pride in his pretty daughter.
“What now?”
“A pilgrimage. A great, big pilgrimage, the last one of the year,” she said eagerly. “I’m going down to see it. Surely you’ll go, too.”
He shook his head.
“Oh, do,” she urged. “You ought to see it, as a matter of history. It is worth more than tons of old records, this seeing middle-age miracles happening in these prosy modern days.”
“Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré isn’t Lourdes, Nancy,” he cautioned her.
“No; but the guide-books say it is only second to Lourdes,” she answered undauntedly. “Anyway, I want to see what is happening. Won’t you come, really, daddy?”
His eyes twinkled, as they looked up into her animated face.
“Nancy, I am sixty-five years old, and that trail up the hill is worse than the Matterhorn. If you follow the zigzags, you walk ten miles in order to accomplish one hundred feet; if you strike out across country, you have to wriggle up on all fours. I know, for I have tried it. It isn’t a seemly thing for a man of my years to come crawling home, flat on his stomach.”
She laughed, as she stood drumming idly on the table.
“I am sorry. It is so much more fun to have somebody to play with. Still, I shall go, even if I must go alone.”
She started towards the door; then turned to face him, as he added hastily—
“And, if you