“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.