The news eclipsed everything else. There were columns of description, rumor and report.
Those who had actually been present had gone straight to the offices of their papers while still under the influence of the tremendous scene they had witnessed.
Joseph was in nearly every case identified with the hero of the strange episodes on the Welsh Hills as exclusively reported in the Daily Wire special of the day before. But the wildest rumors and conjectures filled the papers.
Some said that the stranger and his disciples had appeared miraculously in a sudden flash of light, and disappeared equally mysteriously. The extraordinary and heart-piercing likeness of the stranger to the generally accepted pictures of Our Lord was spoken of with amazement, incredulity, dismay, or contempt, as the case might be.
And nearly all of the papers spoke of a beautiful woman's face beside the preacher, a face like the face of a Madonna—Raphael's picture in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican—alive and glowing.
Here was something for an elderly and fashionable woman of the world to digest ere she was but hardly from her bed!
Lady Kirwan pushed the paper towards Marjorie with trembling fingers.
"Read that," she said, in a voice quite unlike her usual tones of smooth and gracious self-possession.
Marjorie hurriedly scanned the columns of the paper.
"Oh, mother!" she said tearfully. "Isn't it too utterly dreadful for words! How can Mary do such things? Lluellyn's death must have turned her brain."