"Beata," I interrupted seriously, "my purgatory will be long enough, I believe. Indeed, if I get out in the general exodus on the Day of Judgment I shall consider myself happy. Where's the use in your adding to it, and making an old vain man so much vainer? Tell me about what is nearest to your heart to-day."
Thus soberized, she gave me a fairly consecutive account of what had happened. I say "fairly," because, of course, there were many exclamations, and notes of interrogation, and "asides," which I let pass without comment.
Ormsby had paid the suffering child a visit that morning, and had put his final theses and difficulties before her. Disbeliever in miracles, he was face to face with a miracle. That such an awful affliction as befell Alice should be accepted, not only with resignation, but with joy; that she would consider it a positive misfortune to be restored to her old beauty, and that she was forever thanking God that He had elected her to suffering, was either of two things—insanity or inspiration. And her faith in the supernatural—her intense realization of the existence and the daily, hourly influence of our Lord and His Blessed Mother, and her profound conviction that one day her physical shame and torment would intensify her glory in Heaven—all this struck him as a revelation, before which the antics of spiritualists, and the foreknowledge of Brahmins, and the blank agnosticism of science paled into contemptible insignificance.
Bittra, as usual, had been speaking to Mrs. Moylan in the kitchen. Sitting on the straw chair, she spoke for the hundredth time her words of consolation to the poor mother. The murmur of voices came clear, but indistinct, from the little chamber of the sick girl. Then, after a long conference, Ormsby came out, grave and collected as usual, and Bittra having said good by to the mother, and kissed the leprous face of the sick girl, they both walked on in silence, until they came to the bridge that spanned the fiord near the "great house." Ormsby leaned on the parapet of the bridge looking out over the tumbling waters for a long time. Then, turning, he said:—
"Bittra, I must become a Catholic."
Then Bittra put her hand in his gloved palm, and that was all.
"And was that all?" I exclaimed incredulously.
"That's all," said Bittra, "and wasn't it enough?"
"That's not the way a novelist would wind up such a delightful romance," I said. "There would have been at least twenty or thirty pages of lurid description."
"Ah! but this is not a romance," said Bittra; "this is stern reality."