Around midday, we ate our lunch. After this, I invited my companions to pray the Rosary with me, to which they eagerly agreed. We had hardly begun when, there before our eyes, we saw a figure poised in the air above the trees. It looked like a statue made of snow, rendered almost transparent by the rays of the sun.
“What is that?” asked my companions, quite frightened.
“I don’t know!”
We went on praying, with our eyes fixed on the figure before us, and as we finished our prayer, the figure disappeared. As was usual with me, I resolved to say nothing: but my companions told their families what had happened the very moment they reached home. The news soon spread, and one day when I arrived home, my mother questioned me:
“Look here! They say you’ve seen I don’t know what up there. What was it you saw?”
“I don’t know” as I could not explain it myself, I went on: “It looked like a person wrapped up in a sheet!” As I meant to say that I couldn’t discern its features, I added: “You couldn’t make out any eyes, or hands, on it.”
My mother put an end to the whole matter with a gesture of: “Childish nonsense!”
After some time, we returned to our flocks to the same place, and the very same thing happened again. My companions once more told the whole story. After a brief interval, the same thing was repeated. It was the third time that my mother heard all these things being talked about outside, without my having said a single word about them at home. She called me therefore, quite displeased, and demanded:
“Now let us see what it is that you girls say you saw over there?”
“I don’t know mother. I don’t know what it is!”
Some people started making fun of us. My sisters recalling that, for some time after my First Communion, I had been quite abstracted, used to ask me scornfully: “Do you see someone wrapped in a sheet?” I felt these contemptuous words and gestures very keenly, as up to now I had been used to nothing but caresses. But this was nothing really. You see, I did not know what the Good Lord had in store for me in the future.