complete control, restricted by no
human paternal weakness, to the task he had begun. But how? Of all the
boys eagerly offered to the Church by their parents there seemed none
sufficiently pure and free from parental taint. He remembered how one
night, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin herself, as he
firmly then believed, this dream was fulfilled. An Indian woman brought
him a _Waugee_ child--a baby-girl that she had picked up on the
sea-shore. There were no parents to divide the responsibility, the
child had no past to confront, except the memory of the ignorant Indian
woman, who deemed her duty done, and whose interest ceased in giving it
to the Padre. The austere conditions of his monkish life compelled him
to the first step in his adoption of it--the concealment of its sex.
This was easy enough, as he constituted himself from that moment its
sole nurse and attendant, and boldly baptized it among the other
children by the name of Francisco. No others knew its origin, nor cared
to know. Father Pedro had taken a _muchacho_ foundling for adoption;
his jealous seclusion of it and his personal care was doubtless some
sacerdotal formula at once high and necessary.

He remembered with darkening eyes and impeded breath how his close
companionship and daily care of this helpless child had revealed to him
the fascinations of that paternity denied to him; how he had deemed it
his duty to struggle against the thrill of baby fingers laid upon his
yellow cheeks, the pleading of inarticulate words, the eloquence of
wonder-seeing and mutely questioning eyes; how he had succumbed again
and again, and then struggled no more, seeing only in them the
suggestion of childhood made incarnate in the Holy Babe. And yet, even
as he thought, he drew from his gown a little shoe, and laid it beside
his breviary. It was Francisco's baby slipper, a duplicate to those
worn by the miniature waxen figure of the Holy Virgin herself in her
niche in the transept.

Had he felt during these years any qualms of conscience at this
concealment of the child's sex? None. For to him the babe was sexless,
as most befitted one who was to live and die at the foot of the altar.
There was no attempt to deceive God; what mattered else? Nor was he
withholding the child from the ministrations of the sacred sisters.
There was no convent near the Mission, and as each year passed, the
difficulty of restoring her to the position and duties of her sex
became