And in the silence a voice as from the remotest ages arose, and the ancestress said, "_Pater Noster_," and they all repeated the prayer, and then dragged themselves on their knees up the steps of the way of crosses, where the fourteen upright posts, each with its cast metal bas-relief, bordered a serpentine path, dividing the statues from the groups. Thus they went forward, stopping long enough to recite an _Ave_ on each step they climbed, and then, helping themselves with their hands, they mounted to the next. And when the rosary was ended the old woman rose, and they solemnly followed her into the church, where they all prayed a long time, prostrate before the altar; and the grandmother stood up, gave each holy water at the door, led her flock to the spring where they all drank again, and then they went away, without speaking a word, one after another up the narrow path, ending as black specks just as they had come, and vanishing on the horizon. "Those women have been two days and two nights crossing the mountains," said a priest, coming up to Durtal. "They started from the depths of Savoy, and have travelled almost without rest to spend a few minutes here; they will sleep to night in a cow-house or a cave, as chance may direct, and to-morrow by daybreak they will start again on their weariful way." Durtal was overpowered by the radiant splendour of such faith. It was possible, then, to find souls ever young, souls ever new, souls as of undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not, outside cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges, and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who, without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God, while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless ideas, hardly able to express themselves, hardly knowing how to read, wept with love in the presence of the Inaccessible, whom they compelled by their humility and single-heartedness to appear, to become actual to their mind. "Yes, it was but just that the Virgin should cherish them and choose them above all others to be Her vessels of election. "Yes. For they are unburdened with the dreadful weight of doubt, they are endowed with almost total ignorance of evil. "And yet are there not some souls too experienced, alas! in the culture of wrong-doing, who nevertheless find mercy at Her feet? Has not the Virgin other sanctuaries less frequented, less well known, which yet have outlived the wear of time, the various caprice of the ages; very ancient churches where She welcomes you if you love Her in solitude and silence?"