child went on with increased animation:

"And, padre dear, God sends us Anita's little baby for us to love and
protect. Oh, padre, if the little one is a boy, can't we call it
Jose?"

"Yes, _chiquita_," Jose heard the old man murmur brokenly.

"And--padre, if it is a girl--what shall we call it?"

The man's arm tightened about her. "We--we will call it--Carmencita,"
he whispered.

The girl clapped her hands. "Can't you see, padre, that God sends us
Anita's baby so that Padre Diego shall not have it? And now let's go
and tell her so, right away!" she cried, jumping down.

Jose slipped quickly back and stood beside the woman when Carmen and
Rosendo entered the room. The old man went directly to his daughter,
and, taking her in his brawny arms, raised her from the floor and
strained her to his breast. Tears streamed down his swart cheeks, and
the words he would utter choked and hung in his throat.

"Padre," whispered the delighted child, "shall I tell her our names
for the baby?"

Jose turned and stole softly from the room. Divine Love was there, and
its dazzling effulgence blinded him. In the quiet of his own chamber
he sought to understand the marvelous goodness of God to them that
serve Him.

CHAPTER 27

The reversal of a life-current is not always effected suddenly, nor
amid the din of stirring events, nor yet in an environment that we
ourselves might choose as an appropriate setting. It comes in the
fullness of time, and amid such scenes as the human mind which
undergoes the transformation may see externalized within its own
consciousness by the working of the as yet dimly perceived laws of
thought.

Perhaps some one, skilled in the discernment of mental laws and their
subtle, irresistible working, might have predicted the fate which
overtook the man Jose, the fulsome details of which are herein being
recounted. Perhaps such a one might say in retrospect that the
culmination of years of wrong thinking, of false beliefs closely
cherished, of attachment to fear, to doubt, and to wrong concepts of
God, had been externalized at length in eddying the man upon this far
verge of civilization, still clinging feebly to the tattered fragments
of a blasted life. But it would have been a skilled prognostician,
indeed, who could have foreseen the renewal of this wasted life in
that of the young girl, to whom during the past four years Jose de
Rincon had been transferring his own unrealized hopes and his vast