Therefore Mariquita's prayer was more wordless than common, less phrased; but its intensity was more uncommon. Nor could it be limited to those--a handful out of all His children--whom she knew or had ever known. There were all the rest--everywhere: those who knew how to serve Him, and were doing it, as she had never learned to serve; those who had never heard His name, and those who knew it but shrank from it as that of an angry observer; those most hapless ones who lived by disobeying Him, even by dragging others down into the slough of disobedience; the whole world's sick, body-sick and soul-sick; those who here are mad, and will find reason only in heaven; the whole world's sorrowful ones, the luckless, those gripped in the hard clutch of penury, or the sordid clutch of debt; the blind whose first experience of beauty will be perfect beauty, the foully diseased, the deformed, the deaf and dumb whose first speech will be their joining in the songs of heaven, their first hearing that of the music of heaven ... all these, and many, many others she must bring about her, or her gladness in God's nearness would be selfishness. That nearness! she felt Him much nearer than was her own raiment, nearer than was her own flesh.... CHAPTER XVII. It was long after Mariquita had come to her place upon the bluff, that the sound of a horse cantering towards it made her rise and go to the farther westward edge of the bluff to look. The horseman was quite near, below her. It was Gore, and he saw her at the same moment in which she saw him. He lifted his big, wide-brimmed hat from his head and waved it. It would never have even occurred to her to be guilty of the churlishness of turning away to go homeward. Her thoughts, almost the only thing of her own she had ever had, she was always ready to lay aside for courtesy. He had dismounted, and was leading his horse up the rather steep slope. She stood waiting for him, a light rather than a smile upon her noble face, a light like the glow of a far horizon.... "I thought," she said, when he had come up, "that you had gone to Maxwell." "No, I went to Denver this time," he told her, "beyond Denver a little. Where do you think I heard Mass yesterday--this morning again, too? for both of us, since you could not come." "Not at Loretto!" But she knew it was at Loretto. His smile told her. "Yes, at Loretto. It was the same to me which place I went to. No, not the same, for I wanted to see the place where you had been a little girl, so that I could come back and bring you word of it." "Ah, how kind you are!" she said, with a sort of wonder of gratefulness shining on her. ("She is far more beautiful than I ever knew," he thought.) "Not kind at all," Gore protested. "Just to please myself! There's no great kindness in that except to myself." "Oh, yes! for you knew how it would please me. It was wonderful that you should be so kind as to think of it."