the open door at him, watchful of the
minutest detail of his activity. He had now grown used to that. And he
had grown used to their thoughtless intrusion upon him at any hour. He
had learned, too, not to pale with nausea when, as was their wont of
many centuries, the dwellers in this uncouth town relentlessly pursued
their custom of expectorating upon his floor immediately they entered
and stood before him. He had accustomed himself to the hourly
intrusion of the scavenger pigs and starving dogs in his house. And he
could now endure without aching nerves the awful singing, the maudlin
wails, the thin, piercing, falsetto howls which rose almost nightly
about him in the sacred name of music. For these were children with
whom he dwelt. And he was trying to show them that they were children
of God.

The girl's education was progressing marvelously. Already Jose had
been obliged to supplement his oral instruction with texts purchased
for her from abroad. Her grasp of the English language was his daily
wonder. After two years of study she spoke it readily. She loved it,
and insisted that her conversations with him should be conducted
wholly in it. French and German likewise had been taken up; and her
knowledge of her own Castilian tongue had been enriched by the few
books which he had been able to secure for her from Spain.

Jose's anomalous position in Simiti had ceased to cause him worry.
What mattered it, now that he had endeared himself to its people, and
was progressing undisturbed in the training of Carmen? He performed
his religious duties faithfully. His people wanted them. And he, in
turn, knew that upon his observance of them depended his tenure of the
parish.

And he wanted to remain among them, to lead them, if possible, at
least a little way along what he was daily seeing to be the only path
out of the corroding beliefs of the human mind. He knew that his
people's growth would be slow--how slow might not his own be, too! Who
could say how unutterably slow would be their united march heavenward!
And yet, the human mind was expanding with wonderful rapidity in
these last days. What acceleration had it not acquired since that
distant era of the Old Stone Man, when through a hundred thousand
years of darkness the only observable progress was a little greater
skill in the shaping of his crude flint weapons!

To Padre Diego's one or two subsequent curt demands that Carmen be
sent to him, Jose had given no heed.