Three years passed, and Rita had reached the seventy-second year of her age and the fortieth of her life in religion, when it pleased the Lord to visit her with an illness which afflicted her for four years, and ended only with her life. This is the first time after so many years that any illness of Rita's is mentioned, except the sore on her forehead, which goes far to prove that even long-continued and rigorous penances are not--contrary to the opinion of the world's delicacy--opposed to bodily health or calculated to shorten life. It might seem, indeed, that, considering the great misfortunes she had to bear, the many humiliations, and the many voluntary penances she undertook, she ought to be exempted from this final suffering. With all that, God wished that this beautiful work of His hands should be marked by the greatest perfection, and desired to exalt her to the higher places in His glory, and He also willed to add to her past sufferings and the still present troubles of her wounded forehead the pain of this long illness. We do not know with certainty what malady she suffered from, but, whatever it was, it resisted all the remedies of science. It is not improbable that, as one of the writers of her life suggests, it was a wasting fever, one of those maladies that sap the vital strength by degrees through an obstinate and mortal languor, and finally causes death. During all that time she remained confined to her hard bed, and the manner in which she bore all the pains and annoyances of her long illness was a cause of the greatest edification to all who assisted, for her face not only showed the resignation and serenity of her mind, but she was always desiring to suffer still greater pain, and was for ever thanking Divine Providence that deigned to purify her in this world and give her some occasion of acquiring merit. But there was one pain she felt more than any other, and it was because through illness she was become useless to the community, and even a burden and trouble to her sisters, especially by reason of the deformity and offensiveness of the sore on her forehead; yet not even the grief of this could take away from her the merit of her most heroic resignation to the will of God and equally heroic humility and patience. Yet another matter there was which must have weighed heavily on her, when we compare the very lowly opinion she had of herself with that sublimest idea she had been enabled to form of God's infinite majesty, and that was that she could now no longer present herself at the Eucharistic table to receive her Jesus with that frequency with which she had been accustomed to partake of that heavenly bread, but was now, on the contrary, obliged to receive Him lying on her miserable pallet. But the holy soul supplied in ardent desire and in the intensest internal acts of adoration and love for that external veneration which her bodily weakness rendered impossible.