he ruins and squalor of her earthly environment.

"Can a child like Carmen live a sinless life, and still be human?"
Jose often mused, as he watched her flitting through the sunlit hours.
"It is recorded that Jesus did. Ah, yes; but he was born of a virgin,
spotless herself. And Carmen? Is she any less a child of God?" Jose
often wondered, wondered deeply, as he gazed at her absorbed in her
tasks. And yet--how was she born? Might he not, in the absence of
definite knowledge, accept Rosendo's belief--accept it because of its
beautiful, haunting mystery--that she, too, was miraculously born of a
virgin, and "left by the angels on the river bank"? For, as far as he
might judge, her life was sinless. It was true, she did at rare
intervals display little outbursts of childish temper; she sometimes
forgot and spoke sharply to her few playmates, and even to Dona Maria;
and he had seen her cry for sheer vexation. And yet, these were but
tiny shadows that were cast at rarest intervals, melting quickly when
they came into the glorious sunlight of her radiant nature.

But the mystery shrouding the child's parentage, however he might regard
it, often roused within his mind thoughts dark and apprehensive.
Only one communication had come from Padre Diego, and that some four
months after his precipitous flight. He had gained the Guamoco trail,
it said, and finally arrived at Remedios. He purposed returning to
Banco ultimately; and, until then, must leave the little Carmen in the
care of those in whom he had immovable confidence, and to whom he
would some day try, however feebly, to repay in an appropriate manner
his infinite debt of gratitude.

"_Caramba!_" muttered Rosendo, on reading the note. "Does the villain
think we are fools?"

But none the less could the old man quiet the fear that haunted him,
nor still the apprehension that some day Diego would make capital of
his claim. What that claim might accomplish if laid before Wenceslas,
he shuddered to think. And so he kept the girl at his side when in
Simiti, and bound Jose and the faithful Juan to redoubled vigilance
when he was again obliged to return to the mountains.

Time passed. The care-free children of this tropic realm drowsed
through the long, hot days and gossiped and danced in the soft airs of
night. Rosendo held his unremitting, lonely vigil of toil in the
ghastly solitudes of Guamoco. Jose, exiled and outcast, clung
desperately to the child's hand, and strove to