ailing. She could
only sob hysterically and call piteously for her mother. A civil guard
appeared at the street corner, and the priest summoned him. But
scarcely had he reported the details of the accident when, suddenly
uttering a cry, the priest thrust the girl into the arms of the
astonished officer and fled back to the bench where he had been
sitting. Another cry escaped him when he reached it. Throwing himself
upon the grass, he searched beneath the bench and explored the ground
about it. Then, his face blanched with fear, he rose and traversed the
entire park, questioning every occupant. The gamins who had caused the
accident had fled. The beggar, too, had disappeared. The park was all
but deserted. Returning again to the bench, the priest sank upon it
and buried his head in his hands, groaning aloud. A few minutes later
he abruptly rose and, glancing furtively around as if he feared to be
seen, hastened out to the street. Then, darting into a narrow
crossroad, he disappeared in the direction of the Vatican.

At midnight, Padre Jose de Rincon was still pacing the floor of his
room, frantic with apprehension. At the same hour, the small girl who
had so unwittingly plunged him into the gravest danger was safely
asleep in her mother's arms on the night express, which shrieked and
thundered on its way to Lucerne.

CHAPTER 9

Always as a child Jose had been the tortured victim of a vague,
unformed apprehension of impending disaster, a presentiment that some
day a great evil would befall him. The danger before which he now grew
white with fear seemed to realize that fatidic thought, and hang
suspended above him on a filament more tenuous than the hair which
held aloft the fabled sword of Damocles. That filament was the slender
chance that the notebook with which he was occupied when the terrified
child precipitated herself into the river, and which he had hastily
dropped on seeing her plight and rushing to the rescue, had been
picked up by those who would consider its value _nil_ as an instrument
of either good or evil. Before the accident occurred he had been
absorbed in his writing and was unaware of other occupants of the park
than himself and the children, whose boisterous romping in such close
proximity had scarce interrupted his occupation. Then their frightened
cries roused him to an absorbing sense of the girl's danger. Nor did
he think again of the notebook until he was relating the details of
the a