"And you believe he'll be cured?"
"I shall be very much surprised if he's not."
There was a stir by the door as the Russian disappeared. A young, bright-eyed doctor looked in and nodded, and the next instant a brancardier appeared, followed by a litter.
"But how have you time to examine all these thousands of cases?" asked the prelate, watching the litter advance.
"Oh, not one in a hundred comes through to us here. Besides, this is only one of a dozen committee-rooms. It's only the most sensational cases—where there's real organic injury of a really serious kind—that ever come at all before the highest courts. Cases, I mean, where, if there's a cure, the publication of the miracle follows as a matter of course. . . . What's this case, I wonder?" he ended sharply, glancing down at the printed paper before him, and then up again at the litter that was being arranged.
Monsignor looked too at the paper that lay before him. Some thirty paragraphs, carefully numbered, dated, and signed, gave, as it seemed, a list of the cases to be examined.
"Number fourteen," murmured the monk.
Number fourteen, it appeared, was a case of fractured spine—a young girl, aged sixteen; a German. The accident had happened four months before. The notes, signed by half a dozen names, described the complete paralysis below the waist, with a few other medical details.
Monsignor looked again at the girl on the other side of the table, guarded by the brancardiers and a couple of doctors, while the monk talked to him rapidly in Latin. He saw her closed eyes and colourless lips.
"This case has attracted a good deal of attention," whispered the monk. "The Emperor's said to be interested in it, through one of the ladies of the Court, whose servant the girl was. It's interesting for two or three reasons. First, the fracture is complete, and it's marvellous she hasn't died. Then it's been taken up as a kind of test case by a group of materialists in Berlin. They've taken it up, because the girl has declared again and again that she is perfectly certain she will be cured at Lourdes. She claims to have had a vision of Our Lady, who told her so. Her father's a freethinker, by the way, and has only finally allowed her to come so that he can use her as an argument afterwards."