awn face, "you are still thinking that two and two are seven! Will
you never again think right? How can you ever expect to see good if
you look only at evil? If I looked only at wilted flowers I would
never know there were any others."

"Carmen," he said in a hollow voice, "I love you."

"Why, of course you do," returned the artless girl. "You can't help
it. You have just _got_ to love me and everything and everybody.
That's reflecting God."

He had not meant to say that. But it had been floating like foam on
his tossing mind. He took her hand.

"You are going away from me," he continued, almost in a whisper.

"Why, no, Padre," she replied quickly; "you are going too! Padre
Rosendo said we could start to-morrow at sunrise."

"I do not go," he said in a quavering voice. "I remain, in Simiti."

She looked up at him wonderingly. What meant this change which had
come over him so suddenly? She drew closer.

"Why, Padre?" she whispered.

His mother's face hovered before him in the dim light. Behind her
a mitered head, symbolizing the Church, nodded and beckoned
significantly. Back of them, as they stood between him and the
girl, he saw the glorified vision of Carmen. It was his problem. He
turned wearily from it to the gentle presence at his side.

"Why, Padre dear?" came again the soft question.

"I stay--to work out--my problem," was his scarcely audible reply.

The girl did not speak. But her breath came more quickly, and her hand
closed more tightly about his.

"Dearest one," he murmured, bending over the brown curls, "it is God's
way, I guess. Perhaps in the years which I have spent here with you I
have had the time and the opportunity to work out my salvation. I am
sure that I have. But, though I strove in my way, I could not quickly
acquire your spirituality. I could not at once shake loose those
poisonous thoughts of a lifetime, which have at last become
externalized in separation from all that I hold dearest in this life,
you, my beloved girl, you." He buried his face in her luxuriant hair
and strove to hold back the rush of scalding tears.

"It but shows how poisonous thoughts separate us from all that is
good--even from God," he continued in a choked voice. "Oh, my sweet
girl, I love you as it seems to me no human being could love another!
It has been so from that first day when, a mere babe, your wonderful
eyes held me until I could read in them a depth of love for mankind
that was divine." It did