Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/96

 90 colliding together, were falling to the ground. After supper Father Sergius began to repeat a prayer mentally: "O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us," and then he read a psalm.

Suddenly, in the middle of the psalm, a sparrow flew out from a bush on the ground, and hopping along, came to him; then it flew away, frightened. He was reading a prayer that bore upon renunciation of the world, and hastened to get to the end of it in order that he might send for the merchant and his daughter. He was interested in the daughter because she offered a sort of diversion, and also because she and her father thought him a saint—a saint whose prayer was efficacious. He repudiated the idea, but in the depths of his soul he nevertheless concurred. He often wondered how he, Sergius Kasatsky, had contrived to become such an extraordinary saint and worker of miracles; but that it was a fact, he did not doubt. He could not fail to believe in the miracles he saw with his own eyes, beginning with the sick boy and ending with this last old woman who had recovered her sight through his prayers. Strange as it was, it was a fact. Accordingly the merchant's daughter interested him as a new individual that had faith in him, and besides, as an occasion