These words struck home to the very depths of the atheist’s heart. VI That night Anthime had a dream. There was a knock at his bedroom door--not the door into the passage, nor the door into the next room; the knock was at another door, which he had not noticed in his waking hours and which led straight into the street. That was why he was frightened, and at first, instead of answering, lay low. There was a faint light which made the smallest objects in the room visible--a sort of dim effulgence, such as a night-light gives--but there was no night-light. As he was trying to make out where this light could come from, there was a second knock. “What do you want?” he cried in a trembling voice. At the third knock, he fell into a kind of daze; an extraordinary feeling of yielding--in which every trace of fear was swallowed up--paralysed him. (He called it afterwards a tender resignation.) He suddenly felt both that he was incapable of resistance and that the door was going to open. It opened noiselessly and for a moment he saw nothing but a dark alcove, which at first was empty, but in which, as he gazed, there appeared, as in a shrine, the figure of the Holy Virgin. At first he took the small white form for his little niece Julie, dressed as he had just seen her, with her bare feet showing below her night-gown; but a second later he recognised her whom he had insulted; I mean that her appearance was the same as the wayside statue’s; he could even make out the injury to her right arm; and yet the pale face was still more beautiful, still more smiling than before. Without seeming to walk exactly, she came gliding towards him, and when she was close up against his bedside: “Dost thou think, thou who hast hurt me,” she asked, “that I have need of my hand to cure thee?” And with this she raised her empty sleeve and struck him. It seemed to him that it was from her that this strange effulgence emanated. But when the iron rod suddenly pierced his side he felt a stab of frightful pain and woke up in the dark. * * * * * Anthime was perhaps a quarter of an hour before coming to his senses. He felt in his whole body a strange kind of torpor--of stupefied numbness--and then a tingling which was almost pleasant, so that he doubted now whether he had really felt any pain in his side; he could not make out where his dream had begun or ended, and whether he was awake now or whether he had dreamt then. He pinched himself, felt himself all over, put his arm out and finally struck a match. Veronica was asleep beside him with her face to the wall.