. A man was
unconcernedly shoveling oranges out of a cart with a shovel, as if they
had been so much coal. A market woman as unconcernedly dropped some of
the same golden fruit within a small pen where a piglet awaited a
purchaser. To the left, there were rows of unshaded stalls where the
infinitely delicate handmade Paraguayan lace was exposed for sale.

"I--think," said Paula, "I think I will go in the cathedral. I will be
very devout, Charles, and you will find me there when you return. I will
be safe there, certainly."

* * * * *

He walked with her across the crowded plaza. He should have known that
your peasant does not stride with head up, but regarding the ground.
That a man who works heavily droops his shoulders with weariness at the
end of a day. And especially he should have realized that Paraguay is
not, strictly speaking, a Latin-American nation. It is Latin-Indian, in
which the population graduates very definitely from a sub-stratum of
nearly or quite pure Indian race to an aristocracy of nearly or quite
pure Spanish descent, and that the color of a man's skin fixes his place
in society. Both Bell and Paula were too light of skin for the peasant's
clothes they wore. They aroused curiosity at once. If it was not an
active curiosity, it was nevertheless curiosity of a sort.

But Bell left her in the shadowy, cool interior of the cathedral which
seems so pitifully small to be the center of religion for a nation. He
saw her move toward one of the little candle-lit niches in the wall and
fall quite simply on her knees there.

And he moved off, to wander aimlessly down to the river shore and stare
about and presently begin a desultory conversation with sleepy boatmen.

* * * * *

It was three hours and more before he returned to the Cathedral, and
Paula was talking to someone. More, talking to a woman in the most
discreet of mantilla'd church-going costumes. Paula saw him in the
doorway, and uttered a little cry of relief. She came hurrying to him.

"Charles! I have found a friend! Isabella Ybarra. We were schoolmates in
the United States and she has just come back from Paris! So you see, she
cannot--"

"I see," said Bell very quietly.

Paula was speaking swiftly and very softly.

"We went to school together, Charles. I trust her. You must trust her
also. There is no danger, this time. Isabella has never even heard of
The Master. So you s