He looked at the ugly scar on his hand. What thought was externalized in the loathsome experience which produced that? he wondered. Was it the summation of all the fear, the weakness, the wrong belief, that had filled his previous years? And now why was he finding it so difficult to practice what Carmen lived, even though he knew it was truth? "Alas!" he murmured aloud, "it was the seminary that did it. For there my thought was educated away from the simple teachings of Jesus. To Carmen there is no mystery in godliness. Though she knows utterly nothing about Jesus, yet she hourly uses the Christ-principle. It is the children who grasp the simple truths of God; while the lack of spirituality which results from increasing years shrinks maturer minds until they no longer afford entrance to it. For godliness is broad; and the mind that receives it must be opened wide." As he sat with his bowed head clasped in his hands, a sweet, airy voice greeted him. "Why, Padre dear--ah, I caught you that time!--you were thinking that two and two are seven, weren't you?" She shook a rebuking finger at him. Framed in the doorway like an old masterpiece, the sunlight bronzing her heavy brown curls, the olive-tinted skin of her bare arms and legs flushing with health, and her cheap calico gown held tightly about her, showing the contour of her full and shapely figure, the girl appeared to Josè like a vision from the realm of enchantment. And he knew that she did dwell in the land of spiritual enchantment, where happiness is not at the mercy of physical sense. "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" "The Lord our God is a right-thinking God, and right-thinking is what He desires in His people." Josè thought of this as he looked at Carmen. This barefoot girl, who walked humbly, trustingly, with her God, had she not supplied him with a working formula for his every problem, even to the casting out of the corroding fear planted in his heart by that awful experience in Maganguey? Though he had suffered much, yet much had been done for him. The brusque logic of the explorer had swept his mind clear of its last vestige of theological superstition, and prepared it for the truth which, under the benign stimulus of this clear-minded child, would remake his life, if he could now yield himself utterly to it. He must--he would--ceaselessly strive, even though he fell daily, to make his life a pattern of hers, wherein there was no knowledge of evil! The girl came to the priest and leaned fondly against him. Then a little sigh escaped her lips, as she looked down into his face with pitying affection. "Padre dear," she said, in a tone that echoed a strain of sadness, "I--I don't believe--you love God very much." The man was startled, and resentment began to well in his heart. "What a thing to say, Carmen!" he answered reprovingly.