The "faith that could remove mountains!" How the words rang and rang in her ears! Soon her heart grew so light that she could have shouted for joy. "Of course," she murmured with beaming eyes, "if I do not believe that she can do what I ask, how can she answer my prayers? How simple I have been, and how clear it all is to me now. I do believe and know that what I have asked will be granted, and that this very night Ovide will be restored to me, and Marie's mind be made well again." Again and again, out of the fulness of her heart, she kissed the marble feet, and give thanks for the faith within her—the faith that could remove mountains!
Not for a moment did she stop to think what hard requests she had made.
Fatigue and weariness now no longer beset her, and in glad eagerness to see her dear nephew again, and Marie, Mother Soulard fairly ran out of the dimly-lighted church, brushing against the shadowy pews as she sped along the narrow aisles. So bound up was she in her newly-found faith, that she scarcely noticed, on reaching the street, how heavily the rain was falling and how fierce the storm had grown. So boisterous, indeed, was the wind on the bleak Champ de Mars that again and again she had to halt for breath.
"I can imagine I see them," she thought, as she struggled on, "sitting in the parlor together with Delmia. How surprised Delmia must have been when Ovide walked in! and how Marie must have cried and kissed him! But the miracle will soon be known to all the neighbors, and will be told of in the churches, too. They shall be married in church by Father Benoit, because it was through his sermon the miracle was brought about. Ah, what a blessed day this will always be to me!"
As she turned the corner of St. Dominique Street and saw her house, with the yellow glare of the street-lamp still upon it, she caught her old, dripping black dress in her hands, drew it in above her ankles, and began to run, painfully. "Mon Dieu! At last, at last!" she panted.
Delmia, who had fallen asleep in her chair, sprang hastily to her feet as the street-door was burst open, and uttered a startled cry on seeing her sister standing in the doorway, looking with dazed expression around the parlor, the water pouring in great streams from her dress, which she still unconsciously held.
"Where are they? Where are they, Delmia?" she asked, stretching out her hand for support. The heavy fatigue she had borne seemed to come back to her all at once.
In her surprise and haste to reach the door, the bent and palsied Delmia let the crutch slip from her hand, and as she fell heavily after it, and lay struggling to regain her feet again, she looked like some distorted creature of fancy.
The sodden, pitiful figure in the door seemed not to have seen her. "Ovide! Ovide!" she called brokenly, staring blankly around the room.
At last Delmia reached her side. Very gently she drew her into the house and closed the door.