in the ancient city's
archives.

But, as the sunlit days drifted dreamily past with peaceful, unvarying
monotony, Jose's faculties, which had always been alert until he had
been declared insane, gradually awakened. His violently disturbed
balance began to right itself; his equilibrium became in a measure
restored. The deadening thought that he had accomplished nothing in
his vitiated life yielded to a hopeful determination to yet retrieve
past failure. The pride and fear which had balked the thought of
self-destruction now served to fan the flame of fresh resolve. He
dared not do any writing, it was true. But he could delve and study.
And a thousand avenues opened to him through which he could serve his
fellow-men. The papal instructions which his traveling companion, the
Apostolic Delegate, had brought to the Bishop of Cartagena, evidently
had sufficed for his credentials; and the latter had made no occasion
to refer to the priest's past. An order from the Vatican was law; and
the Bishop obeyed it with no other thought than its inerrancy and
inexorability. And with the lapse of the several months which had
slipped rapidly away while he sought to forget and to clear from his
mind the dark clouds of melancholia which had settled over it, Jose
became convinced that the Bishop knew nothing of his career prior to
his arrival in Colombia.

And it is possible that the young priest's secret would have died with
him--that he would have lived out his life amid the peaceful scenes of
this old, romantic town, and gone to his long rest at last with the
consciousness of having accomplished his mite in the service of his
fellow-beings; it is possible that Rome would have forgotten him; and
that his uncle's ambitions, to which he knew that he had been regarded
as in some way useful, would have flagged and perished over the watery
waste which separated the New World from the Old, but for the
intervention of one man, who crossed Jose's path early in his new
life, found him inimical to his own worldly projects, and removed him,
therefore, as sincerely in the name of Christ as the ancient
_Conquistadores_, with priestly blessing, hewed from their paths of
conquest the simple and harmless aborigines.

That man was Wenceslas Ortiz, trusted servant of Holy Church,
who had established himself in Cartagena to keep a watchful eye on
anticlerical proceedings. That he was able to do this, and at the
same time turn them greatly to his own adv