For her only answer, she took it from the folds of her blouse and laid it in his hand. He walked on for a moment, looking down at it with loving, reverent eyes. Then he gave it back into her keeping.
“I had hoped so much from it,” he said slowly; “so much more than you ever knew. I regarded the name as an omen of good. I even made my novena; but it was all in vain.” His voice dropped. “All in vain.” Then he steadied himself. “But the favor? It is to be next Thursday, three days from now. The operation, I mean. On that day, will you go out to the shrine of the Good Sainte Anne, and say a prayer for me? You are no Catholic, I know; but it will help me to be brave, if I can feel that together you and she are making intercession in my behalf.”
Resolutely Nancy brushed the tears from her cheeks and faced him with a smile.
“I—promise,” she said. Then her voice failed her again.
“Thank you. It will be a help. Beyond that, I ask nothing of you. In the one case, it could do no good. In the other, I shall come back to you. There is no need to tell you all I have wished—and hoped—and prayed for, all you have been in my life, these past weeks. If the Good Sainte Anne wills it, I shall tell it all to you, some day. If not—good by.”
As he took her hand into his strong fingers, Nancy’s tear-dim eyes were blind to everything but the unspoken love and longing in the great dark eyes before her, everything but the point of the lower lip rolling outward in its pitiful attempt to form its own brave, characteristic little smile.
Then, hat in hand and the snow sifting down on his thick dark hair, he turned away and left her alone beside the old gray wall in the fast-gathering snow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Five days later, the doctor came back from Rimouski. Nancy, on the platform of the station, waited eagerly until he came in sight. Then she stepped back and hid her face.
“It was all so like his life,” her father said, when they sat together in his room, that night; “brave and quiet and full of thought for us all. Once he rallied for a few hours, and we felt there was hope. At the very last, he gave me this for you. He said you would understand.” And the doctor laid in Nancy’s palm a tiny figure of the Good Sainte Anne, the exact duplicate of her own, save that its silver base bore the arms of St. Jacques and, beneath, two plain initials: N and H.