José allowed him to take it in his hand. “It has a story?” said the monk. “Tell me, my son, if you will. We are all the world to each other now.” “The story of one I loved—and lost,” José murmured, in a voice like the ghost of his natural one. “It was Don Francisco Solis who robbed me, making my life desolate. As, every day, his people rob mine. And,” he added yet more sorrowfully, “Christ, the King, does not help us!” “José, José, come near to me.” José came near. The monk raised himself, drew his arm tenderly round him, and held him to his heart. “Oh, my son,” he asked very gently, “can you not trust Him still?” “Still,—even still,—I hold the Saviour. At least, I hope He holds me. But the King—” “Is strong to save us yet,” said Fray Fernando. “To save _us_?—It may be. But what are we two, down here in the hold, with only two lives to lose? It is my people I think of—my people! For them my heart is heavy as stone, cold as ice of the Antis. Day and night, patre, I see visions and dream dreams. Faces look upon me—dark faces, growing ghastly in dungeons like this—agonized faces—faces of the tortured and famine-stricken, of the women and little children who weep in secret places, and there is none to pity them.” “None—upon earth,” Fray Fernando interposed. “But, you know—” “I _know_ nothing. I try to believe, even yet, that He cares,” said José, whose heart was sickening now with the sorest of all doubts. “Ay, patre,” he went on more earnestly, “He said, ‘I have compassion on the multitude.’ In those happy days at Callao, when I came to know Him first, I put my finger on that word, I knelt down and pleaded it with Him—for my people. And I believed surely that He would do them right at last. It was so well with me that I never doubted it would be well with all I loved. But in those dreary weeks, shut up in that hateful Santa Casa, hope faded from me day by day. Not hope for myself. Still, when He calls, I can give my soul up to Him without fear. But my people—my people! Who shall show me any light or hope for them? Must wrong and cruelty go on for ever and ever—none to help, none to save?” Fray Fernando’s heart went up in an agony of earnest prayer for his beloved son, in this hour of sore and bitter need. At last he said, “But where you trust your own soul, José, you can surely trust all else that your heart holds dear?” “I suppose so,” José murmured. “At least I ought. But all is dark—dark. Wrong triumphs always. Nothing seems to come right.” Fray Fernando had reached the place of sunshine, far up on the mountain summit, very near the sky. But José was still in the _Puna_, the land of mist and rain, where no sunbeams pierce the thick dark veil of clouds. “José,” said the monk once again, “I pray you, do not think of men. Think of Christ. Look to Him.”