"Let us wait, then." The invalid relapsed into silence. The long night finally passed.
The joyous bells at last announced the day. The morning Angelus as it rose carried up to the Virgin Mother the prayers of earth, and celebrated the eternal memory of her all-powerful maternity. Lubine hastened to Madame Nessans's, and soon returned with a bottle of water from the grotto.
"Here, mother! Drink! and may the Blessed Virgin come to your help!" Madame Rizan raised the glass to her lips, and swallowed a few mouthfuls.
"O my daughter! my daughter! It is life that I am drinking! Here is life in this water! Bathe my face with it! Bathe my arms! Bathe my whole body with it!"
Trembling and almost beside herself, Lubine moistened a piece of linen with the miraculous water, and bathed her mother's face.
"I feel that I am cured!" she cried in a voice now clear and strong. "I feel that I am cured!"
Lubine meanwhile bathed with the wet linen the paralyzed and swollen limbs of the invalid. Trembling with mingled joy and terror, she saw the enormous swelling disappear under the rapid movement of her hand, and the stretched and shining skin reassume its natural appearance.
Suddenly, completely, and without transition, health and life revived beneath her touch.
"It seems to me as if burning pimples were breaking out all over me." It was, doubtless, the principle of disease leaving for ever under the influence of a superhuman will. All this was over in a moment. In a couple of minutes the body of Madame Rizan, apparently in her agony, bathed by her daughter, recovered the fulness of strength.
"I am cured! perfectly cured!" cried the happy woman. "Oh! how good the Blessed Virgin is! Oh! how powerful she is!"