entered into his being.

But then the shadows began to gather once more. He did not cling to
the new truths and spiritual ideas tenaciously enough to work them out
in demonstration. He had proved shallow soil, whereon the seed had
fallen, only to be choked by the weeds which grew apace therein. The
troubles which clustered thick about him after his first few months in
Simiti had seemed to hamper his freer limbs, and check his upward
progress. Constant conflict with Diego, with Don Mario, and Wenceslas;
the pressure from his mother and his uncle, had kept him looking, now
at evil, now at good, giving life and power to each in turn, and
wrestling incessantly with the false concepts which his own mentality
kept ever alive. Worrying himself free from one set of human beliefs,
he fell again into the meshes of others. Though he thought he knew the
truth--though he saw it lived and demonstrated by Carmen--he had yet
been afraid to throw himself unreservedly upon his convictions. And so
he daily paid the dire penalty which error failed not to exact.

But Carmen, the object of by far the greater part of all his anxious
thought, had moved as if in response to a beckoning hand that remained
invisible to him. Each day she had grown more beautiful. And each
day, too, she had seemed to draw farther away from him, as she
rose steadily out of the limited encompassment in which they
dwelt. Not by conscious design did she appear to separate from him,
but inevitably, because of his own narrow capacity for true
spiritual intercourse with such a soul as hers. He shared her
ideals; he had sought in his way to attain them; he had striven,
too, to comprehend her spirit, which in his heart he knew to be a
bright reflection of the infinite Spirit which is God. But as the
years passed he had found his efforts to be like her more and more
clumsy and blundering, and his responses to her spiritual demands less
and less vigorous. At times he seemed to catch glimpses of her
soul that awed him. At others he would feel himself half inclined
to share the people's belief that she was possessed of powers
occult. And then he would sink into despair of ever understanding the
girl--for he knew that to do so he must be like her, even as to
understand God we must become like Him.

After her fourteenth birthday Jose found himself rapidly ceasing to
regard Carmen as a mere child. Not that she did not still often
seem delightfully immature, when her spirits wou