'"They tell me I have healing hands," she said. "I have a seed-grain of faith, I think, and that is the secret of them."
'I saw her only for a few moments. I will try to tell you or rather to show you what she looked like, when I have ended my story. She enlightened me not a little. I saw how lame a thing my own journey was my leisurely dawdling back to my work. This girl came as it were on wings, with power in her heart and will, that would take no denial but God's. Her few words as we walked up and down the well-deck were words that burnt and shone in the cold dark. I am talking about things as I saw them just then. As a matter of fact, I believe it was a blazing night with a moon at the full, and stars dropping over one another. I remember that I slept on deck afterwards. I had a sort of Midsummer South African Christmas picnic feeling (up till cock-crow, when the fever that had dogged me that month came again). It was really a consummate night. But as she talked, she made it seem cold and dark, her words were so radiantly kind.
'T think we talked about Saint Vincent of Paris mostly, and of men that had carried in their bodies the marks of the Lord Jesus; and of the imitation of Jesus in India and Africa. Then she said "Good night!" and was gone.
'Next day that return of fever blurred my new visions of the
Light. Yet I was to see her again. An hour before we came off
Chinde, she asked leave to come up on to our second-class deck
and to bid me "Good-bye."
'I was lying in a deck-chair, my hat tilted over my eyes, under the morning sun. She was suddenly beside me and speaking to me. She gave me a watchword out of that confident ending of Saint Mark, to which, some people, who have their misgivings, attach so little credit. It was this, "They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover." Then she prayed for me, lifting up her healing hands. And she held out to me a tiny flask that I might anneal myself, "For that is your own office," she said.
'My head had defied sleep, but now sleep came apace. It seemed to me it came breathing about me with the light gusts of wind. I slept, nor did I know when she said "Good-bye."
'When I awoke the sun was westering. Some passengers had
trans-shipped for Chinde four hours or more ago, a man told me.
She was gone, and I was well. No, not well in one way, but mending.
That is all or almost all of my tale.'
He had told it reverently. Towards the end of the telling, he himself seemed to wander as he told.
'What was she like?' I asked after a silence.
'She was much like that picture of Saint Lucy,' he said.