"I would have gone on my knees all the way to Blackwater to see it."
"I couldn't have believed it possible," the Doctor replied.
"Ah, what children we are, entirely. God confounds all our reckoning. We can't count with His miracles. And the greatest of all miracles is a mother's love for her child."
"Let us leave her now, though," said the Doctor. "She's like herself again, but still . . ."
"Yes, let us leave them together," whispered Father Dan, and having swept everybody out before him (I thought Aunt Bridget went away ashamed) he stepped off himself on tiptoe, as if treading on holy ground.
Then my mother, who was holding my hand and sometimes putting it to her lips, said:
"Tell me everything that has happened."
As soon as my little tongue was loosed I told her all about my life at the Convent—about the Reverend Mother and the nuns and the novices and the girls (all except Sister Angela and Alma) and the singing of the hymn to the Virgin—talking on and on and on, without observing that, after a while, my mother's eyes had closed again, and that her hand had become cold and moist.
At length she said: "Is it getting dark, Mary?"
I told her it was night and the lamp was burning.