The front of the long procession, Monsignor saw, had reached now the doors of the basilica, and would presently, after making the complete round, pour down into the arena to allow the Blessed Sacrament to move more quickly.  It was an exquisite sight, even from here, as the prelate set foot on the platform and began to move to the left.  The long lines of tapers, four deep, went like some great serpent, rippling with light, above the heads of the sick; and here and there in the slopes of the crowded spectators shone out other lights, steady as stars in the motionless half-lit evening air.  Then, as he went, slowly, pace by pace, he remembered the sick and glanced down, as the music on a sudden ceased.

Ah! there they lay, those living crucifixes . . . . shrouded in white, their faces on either side turned inwards that they might see their Lord. . . .  There lay a woman, her face shrivelled with some internal horror—­some appalling disease which even the science of these days dared not handle, or at least had not; her large eyes staring with an almost terrible intensity, fixed, it seemed, in her head, yet waiting for the Vision that even now might make her whole.  There a child tossed and moaned and turned away his head.  There an old man crouched forward upon his litter, held up on either side by two men in the uniform of the brancardiers. . . .  And so, in endless lines, they lay; from every nation under heaven:  Chinese were there, he saw, and negroes; and the very air in which he walked seemed alight with pain and longing.

A great voice broke in suddenly on his musings; and, before he could fix his attention as to what it said, the words were taken up by the hundreds of thousands of throats—­a short, fervent sentence that rent the air like a thunder-peal.  Ah! he remembered now.  These were the old French prayers, consecrated by a century of use; and as he passed on, slowly, step by step, watching now with a backward glance the blessing of the sick that had just begun—­the sign of the cross made with the light golden monstrance by the bishop who carried it—­now the agonized eyes of expectation that waited for their turn, he too began to hear, and to take up with his own voice those piteous cries for help.

“Jesu! heal our sick. . . .  Jesu! grant that we may see—­may hear—­may walk. . . .  Thou art the Resurrection and the Life. . . .  Lord!  I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.”  Then with an overwhelming triumph:  “Hosanna to the Son of David!  Hosanna, Hosanna!” Then again, soft and rumbling:  “O Mary, conceived without sin, hear us who have recourse to thee.”

The sense of a great circumambient Power grew upon him at each instant, sacramentalized, it seemed, by the solemn evening light, and evoked by this tense ardour of half a million souls, and focused behind him in one burning point. . . .