nine o'clock
Assuredly it was in her glance that Abbe Ader had with agitation detected the stifling ailment which filled her puny , girlish form with suffering -- that ailment born of the greeny solitude in which she had grown up , the gentleness of her bleating lambs , the Angelic Salutation which she had carried with her , hither and thither , under the sky , repeating and repeating it to the point of hallucination , the prodigious stories , too , which she had heard folks tell at her foster-mother 's , the long evenings spent before the living altar-screens in the church , and all the atmosphere of primitive faith which she had breathed in that far-away rural region , hemmed in by mountains . At last , on one seventh of January , Bernadette had just reached her fourteenth birthday , when her parents , finding that she learnt nothing at Bartres , resolved to bring her back to Lourdes for good , in order that she might diligently study her catechism , and in this wise seriously prepare herself for her first communion . And so it happened that she had already been at Lourdes some fifteen or twenty days , when on February 11 , a Thursday , cold and somewhat cloudy -- But Pierre could carry his narrative no further , for Sister Hyacinthe had risen to her feet and was vigorously clapping her hands . `` My children , '' she exclaimed , `` it is past nine o'clock . Silence ! silence ! '' The train had indeed just passed Lamothe , and was rolling with a dull rumble across a sea of darkness -- the endless plains of the Landes which the night submerged .