“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.”