learning, but without the dross of inherited or attached beliefs, and
without taint of his native vacillation and indecision of mind.

For what he had been striving to fit her, he knew not. But in a
vaguely outlined way he knew that he was being used as a tool to shape
in some degree the mental development of this strange girl. Nor,
indeed, as the years passed, did she continue to seem so strange to
him. On the contrary, he now thought it more marvelous by far that the
world, after nineteen centuries of Christianity, did not think and act
more as did this girl, whose religious instruction he knew to have
been garnered at the invisible hand of God. That she must some day
leave him, despite her present earnest protestations, he felt to be
inevitable. And the thought pierced his soul like a lance. But he
could not be certain that with maturity she would wish to remain
always in the primitive environment in which she had been nurtured.
Nor could he, even if she were willing, immolate her upon the barb of
his own selfishness.

As for himself, the years had but seemed to increase the conviction
that he could never leave the Church, despite his anomalous position
and despite his renewed life--unless, indeed, she herself cast him
forth. Each tenderly hopeful letter from his proud, doting mother only
added to this conviction by emphasizing the obstacles opposing such a
course. Her declining years were now spent among the mental pictures
which she hourly drew upon the canvas of her imagination, pictures in
which her beloved son, chastened and purified, had at length come into
the preferment which had always awaited loyal scions of the house of
Rincon. Hourly she saw the day draw nearer when he should be restored
to her yearning arms. Each dawn threw its first rays upon his
portrait, which hung where her waking eyes might open upon it. Each
night the shadow cast by the candle which always burned beneath it
seemed to her eager sight to crown that fair head with a bishop's
mitre--a cardinal's hat--aye, at times she even saw the triple crown
of the Vicar of Christ resting upon those raven locks. Jose knew this.
If her own pen did not always correctly delineate her towering hopes,
his astute uncle did not fail to fill in whatever hiatus remained. And
the pressure of filial devotion and pride of race at times completely
smothered within him the voice of Truth which Carmen continually
sounded, and made him resolve often that on the d