At last! At last! He never doubted that it was the coffin he sought; he did not know that his mother's grave lay actually yards away from him. Oh, were there only light, he thought; it was so dark, for the moon had now passed down behind the wall of the graveyard, and there would be only henceforth growing ever darker and darker that dense gloom which precedes the dawn. He dared not go on digging; he was afraid that the iron of his spade should stave in the soft wood of the coffin, and cut and maim the body within it. He stooped and pushed the clay aside with his hands, trying to feel what the tool had struck. What met his touch was not wood, but metal--rounded, smooth, polished; though clogged and crusted with the clay-bed in which it lay. He pushed the earth farther and farther away, and the object he had reached seemed to lie far down, under the soil, and to be held down by it. He was himself hemmed in by the broken clods, and stood in the hole he had dug, half imprisoned by it. But he could move enough to strike a few remaining matches on the iron of the spade, and let their light fall on what he had unearthed. Then it seemed to him that a miracle had been wrought. Before him lay a silver image of the Child Christ. His knees shook, his whole frame trembled, his lips gasped for breath; the flame of the matches died out; he was left in the dark with the image. 'It is the Gesu! It is the Gesu!' he muttered, sure that his dead mother, or the saints, or both, had wrought this miracle to show him the evil of his ways. In truth, the statue had lain there many centuries, buried against the wall by pious hands in times when the torch of war had been carried flaming over all the wasted villages and ravaged fields in the plain below. But no such explanation dawned on the mind of Caris. To him it was a miracle wrought by the saints or by the dead. In the dark he could feel its round shoulders, its small hands folded as in prayer, its smooth cheek and brow, its little breast; and he touched them reverently, trembling in every nerve. He had heard of holy images shown thus to reward belief or to confound disbelief. His faith was vague, dull, foolish, but it was deep-rooted in him. He was a miserable sinner; and the dead and the saints turned him thus backward on his road to hell; so he thought, standing waist-deep in the rugged clay and clutching his spade to keep himself from falling in a swoon. V To Caris miracles were as possible as daily bread. He knew little of them, but he believed in them with his whole soul. It seemed wonderful that the heavenly powers should create one for such a poor and humble creature as himself; but it did not seem in any way wonderful that such a thing should be. The Divine Child was there in the earth, keeping away all evil things by its presence, and he could not doubt that the saints who were with Mary, or perchance his own mother's purified spirit, had called the image there to save him from the fiend.