id, taking an offish, man-of-the-world tone, "all this fuss
just because a woman believed in God."

"You have put it down wrong," said the Virginian; "it's just because a
man didn't."

Padre Ignazio

At Santa Ysabel del Mar the season was at one of its moments when the
air hangs quiet over land and sea. The old breezes had gone; the new
ones were not yet risen. The flowers in the mission garden opened wide,
for no wind came by day or night to shake the loose petals from their
stems. Along the basking, silent, many-colored shore gathered and
lingered the crisp odors of the mountains. The dust floated golden and
motionless long after the rider was behind the hill, and the Pacific lay
like a floor of sapphire, on which to walk beyond the setting sun into
the East. One white sail shone there. Instead of an hour, it had been
from dawn till afternoon in sight between the short headlands; and the
padre had hoped that it might be his ship. But it had slowly passed.
Now from an arch in his garden cloisters he was watching the last of it.
Presently it was gone, and the great ocean lay empty. The padre put his
glasses in his lap. For a short while he read in his breviary, but soon
forgot it again. He looked at the flowers and sunny ridges, then at
the huge blue triangle of sea which the opening of the hills let into
sight. "Paradise," he murmured, "need not hold more beauty and peace. But
I think I would exchange all my remaining years of this for one sight
again of Paris or Seville. May God forgive me such a thought!"

Across the unstirred fragrance of oleanders the bell for vespers began
to ring. Its tones passed over the padre as he watched the sea in his
garden. They reached his parishioners in their adobe dwellings near
by. The gentle circles of sound floated outward upon the smooth immense
silence--over the vines and pear-trees; down the avenues of the olives;
into the planted fields, whence women and children began to return; then
out of the lap of the valley along the yellow uplands, where the men
that rode among the cattle paused, looking down like birds at the map
of their home. Then the sound widened, faint, unbroken, until it met
Temptation riding towards the padre from the south, and cheered the
steps of Temptation's jaded horse.

"For a day, one single day of Paris!" repeated the padre, gazing through
his cloisters at the empty sea.

Once in the year the mother-world remembered him. Once in the year a