ips of the pale Padre were a
whisper too light, too deep, for Gaston's heedless ear.

"Why," the young man pursued in a spirit that was but half levity,
"though I yield often to temptation, at times I have resisted it, and
here I should miss the very chance to resist. Your garden could never be
Eden for me, because temptation is absent from it."

"Absent!" Still lighter, still deeper, was this whisper that the Padre
breathed.

"I must find life," exclaimed Gaston, "and my fortune at the mines, I
hope. I am not a bad fellow, Father. You can easily guess all the things
I do. I have never, to my knowledge, harmed any one. I didn't even
try to kill my adversary in an affair of honor. I gave him a mere
flesh-wound, and by this time he must be quite recovered. He was my
friend. But as he came between me--"

Gaston stopped, and the Padre, looking keenly at him, saw the violence
that he had noticed in church pass like a flame over the young man's
handsome face.

"That's nothing dishonorable," said Gaston, answering the priest's look.
And then, because this look made him not quite at his ease: "Perhaps a
priest might feel obliged to say it was dishonorable. She and her father
were--a man owes no fidelity before he is--but you might say that had
been dishonorable."

"I have not said so, my son."

"I did what every gentleman would do." insisted Gaston.

"And that is often wrong!" said the Padre, gently and gravely. "But I'm
not your confessor."

"No," said Gaston, looking down. "And it is all over. It will not begin
again. Since leaving New Orleans I have traveled an innocent journey
straight to you. And when I make my fortune I shall be in a position to
return and--"

"Claim the pressed flower?" suggested the Padre. He did not smile.

"Ah, you remember how those things are!" said Gaston: and he laughed and
blushed.

"Yes," said the Padre, looking at the anchored barkentine, "I remember
how those things are."

For a while the vessel and its cargo and the landed men and various
business and conversations occupied them. But the freight for the
mission once seen to, there was not much else to detain them.

The barkentine was only a coaster like many others which had begun to
fill the sea a little more of late years, and presently host and guest
were riding homeward. Side by side they rode, companions to the eye, but
wide apart in mood; within the turbulent young figure of Gaston dwelt
a spirit that could not be mor