She clutches two rosaries and an angel pendant a friend gave her while she reads from her Catholic prayer books for 45 minutes at a time.

Among her favorite prayers is one by St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. Agnes has a statue of him in the front lawn of the house she grew up in on the corner of Lee and Banks streets.

To his right is a statue of the Virgin Mary, surrounded by 14 angels Agnes has set out for Christmas.

Angels are displayed in the front windows and one is on the Banks Street side. They surround a nativity scene near Agnes’ chair in the front room.

Some were brought out for the holidays, and some she leaves out all year.

Agnes believes in angels, always has. She believes in miracles, too, and when her beloved cat got sick a month ago, she asked for one — a miracle for Christmas.

She believes her prayer was answered.

This is the story of Agnes Nassar’s miracle, if you choose to believe.

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Agnes began worrying when Baby stopped running around and playing with her four other cats and her brother’s dog. He wasn’t sitting at the front door waiting for a chance to get out. He wasn’t eating.He just wanted to lie around.

When he crawled on her lap and was too weak to move, she got scared. Something was definitely wrong with Baby.

She called Dr. George Hill, the veterinarian who had been treating her animals for some 20 years.

It was 1:30 in the morning, and he wasn’t on call, but Hill told her to bring Baby on out to his office. He would be right there.

When he examined the 10-year-old Russian blue cat, Hill says Baby was having difficulty breathing and his temperature was elevated. Hill could hear a rattle in the cat’s lungs.

“And upon X-ray, we did see a soft tissue mass involving the cardiac lobe of the lung,” he says. “It was on the left side.”

Hill broke the news gently. He remembered how devastated 68-year-old Agnes had been when her cat, Candy, died of cancer three years before.

Agnes Nassar’s cats mean the world to her. “She is one of the most attached clients I know,” Hill says.

Baby has a shadow on his left lung, he told her. “He was afraid it might be cancerous,” Agnes remembers.

Hill told her he wanted to keep the cat at the clinic and treat it with antibiotics and IV fluid therapy.

“Do I have to leave him?” Agnes wanted to know. “Yes, you’ve got to leave him,” he responded.

Agnes couldn’t sleep that night, or the next.

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After two nights at the clinic, Hill agreed to let Agnes take Baby home. He prescribed an antibiotic, a decongestant and vitamins.

There’s nothing else to do but give him the medicine and wait, he told her. After a month, Hill said he wanted to take another X-ray to see if there were any changes in the mass.

Agnes, when she wasn’t taking care of her brother, Rudy, who is bedridden from a stroke, looked after Baby. When she read her prayers morning and night, she held him in her lap and placed a bookmark with the St. Francis prayer on it on his chest.

Morning after morning, night after night, Agnes prayed for her miracle.

And when she had finished with her prayers, she poured water her niece had brought back from an old well in Jerusalem into her hand and rubbed it on his chest.

“This is Easter holy water,” she says. “I wasn’t ever going to use it because I didn’t want it to evaporate or anything. But I thought, ‘What good is it if I don’t use it?’ ”

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Agnes could tell Baby was feeling better by the way he acted. He would take his paw and run it across the top of her prayer books, she says, “like he was going to try and turn the page.”

Her faith was strong. Agnes had seen other miracles.

When she was recuperating from back surgery several years ago, she was lying in her daybed in a great deal of pain.“I didn’t feel well,” she says, “and all of a sudden, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up, and it wasn’t an angel.”

Agnes says she saw her father, who had died many years before.

“I thought, ‘No, that’s not possible,’ ” she says.

She called her brother and asked him if anyone else could have been in the house. “He said, ‘No,’ ” she says. “But I felt that hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘You’re going to be all right.’

“And I was all right.”

Another time, when she was in high school, Agnes says a strong feeling came over her that her mother wasn’t feeling well. “I started crying,” she says, “and asked the teacher, ‘May I be excused?’ ”

Agnes walked home and found her mother lying in the yard. She had been hanging up clothes and fell.

“She said, ‘I just got so hot, and I fell down,’ ” Agnes recalls. “She said, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’ I don’t know whether that has to do with ESP or faith or a strong connection between family.

“Our family has always been very, very close.”

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Agnes’ devotion to her family has never wavered in her life. She took care of her mother for 20 years and her uncle for 10 years.

For the 20 years she was sick, Agnes prayed for her mother, who had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure. And when she died at age 95, Agnes prayed for the strength to go on. “It took me a long time, but I managed,” she says.

Agnes’ uncle died at age 96 of heart disease. “So I just have my brother left,” she says, “and he’s 75.”

Most everybody in town knows Rudy, she says. He ran Nassar’s Fruit Stand on East Innes Street for years.

Agnes Nassar married once, but he didn’t want her taking care of her mother and uncle. “So we just separated and got a divorce,” she says. “I don’t talk about that much.”

After that, Agnes’ cats became like her children. When she was lonely, they kept her company. When she wasn’t feeling well, they would curl up beside her. When she was depressed, they cheered her up.

“They’re family to me,” she says. “A lot of people don’t understand that.”

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When the month was up, Agnes took Baby back to Hill’s office.

He took another X-ray and called her in to look at it. “He said, ‘Here, I want to show you something,’ ” she says.

Hill pointed to the mass on the first X-ray and then pointed to the second. “This X-ray is perfect,” she says he told her. “He said, ‘I see absolutely nothing wrong with this X-ray. You have nothing to worry about.’ ”

Was he just saying that to make her feel better? Agnes wanted to know. She had been so worried and with it being Christmas and all.

He couldn’t do something like that, Hill told her. “I have to tell you as it is,” she says he said. “He’s all right.”

The first X-ray definitely showed a mass, according to Hill.

“It does not mean it was cancerous,” he says. “It could have been congestion, but it was suspicious enough for me to want to take another X-ray in a month’s time to see whether or not that mass was still there and whether it had increased in size.”

If it had increased, Hill says he would have made a diagnosis of cancer.

“I don’t get into the Biblical-type thing (with clients),” he says, “but I don’t criticize it either. I believe in faith, and I believe there are miracles to be performed by healing.

“It’s way beyond what veterinarians, dentists or physicians can explain.”

The bottom line, Hill says, is Baby was very sick, he was on medication, and now he’s better.

The cat even gained two pounds. “I couldn’t believe it,” Hill says.

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Agnes is planning a quiet Christmas celebration. She’ll be taking care of Rudy, and spending time with Baby and her other cats, Sam, Samantha, Princess and Lucky. Rudy’s lab, Ginger, will be there with them.

Three more mouths will be joining the Nassars for Christmas dinner. Someone recently dropped a mother cat and two kittens off, but Agnes says she can’t afford to keep them. She’s feeding them outside until they get tame enough for the Humane Society to find them a home.

Agnes continues to say her prayers morning and night, her rosaries and angel in her hand. They are prayers from the heart of a grateful woman.