Doña Maria's summons to breakfast interrupted the conversation. Throughout the repast Josè felt himself subjected to the closest scrutiny by Carmen. What was running through her thought, he could only vaguely surmise. But he instinctively felt that he was being weighed and appraised by this strange child, and that she was finding him wanting in her estimate of what manner of man a priest of God ought to be. And yet he knew that she embraced him in her great love. Oftentimes his quick glance at her would find her serious gaze bent upon him. But whenever their eyes met, her sweet face would instantly relax and glow with a smile of tenderest love--a love which, he felt, was somehow, in some way, destined to reconstruct his shattered life. Josè's plans for educating the girl had gradually evolved into completion during the past two days. He explained them at length to Rosendo after the morning meal; and the latter, with dilating eyes, manifested his great joy by clasping the priest in his brawny arms. "But remember, Rosendo," Josè said, "learning is not _knowing_. I can only teach her book-knowledge. But even now, an untutored child, she knows more that is real than I do." "Ah, Padre, have I not told you many times that she is not like us? And now you know it!" exclaimed the emotional Rosendo, his eyes suffused with tears of joy as he beheld his cherished ideals and his longing of years at last at the point of realization. What he, too, had instinctively seen in the child was now to be summoned forth; and the vague, half-understood motive which had impelled him to take the abandoned babe from Badillo into the shelter of his own great heart would at length be revealed. The man's joy was ecstatic. With a final clasp of the priest's hand, he rushed from the house to plunge into the work in progress at the church. Josè summoned Carmen into the quiet of his own dwelling. She came joyfully, bringing an ancient and obsolete arithmetic and a much tattered book, which Josè discovered to be a chronicle of the heroic deeds of the early _Conquistadores_. "I'm through decimals!" she exclaimed with glistening eyes; "and I've read some of this, but I don't like it," making a little _moue_ of disgust and holding aloft the battered history. "Padre Rosendo told me to show it to you," she continued. "But it is all about murder, you know. And yet," with a little sigh, "he has nothing else to read, excepting old newspapers which the steamers sometimes leave at Bodega Central. And they are all about murder, and stealing, and bad things, too. Padre, why don't people write about good things?" Josè gazed at her reverently, as of old the sculptor Phidias might have stood in awe before the vision which he saw in the unchiseled marble.