José, who had now attained his full height, and assumed an air of manly independence quite new to him, gravely took the burden from his shoulder, and laid it at the feet of Fray Fernando. It was the monk’s first impulse to embrace his adopted child; but some momentary, unaccountable feeling, shared probably by both, checked the impulse, and held them apart. “How is this, my son?” Fray Fernando questioned, in anxious and displeased surprise. “Where is the Spanish dress I gave you?” José pointed to the burden at their feet. His countenance seemed as much changed as his dress. Fray Fernando thought its expression sullen, almost fierce. “I hope,” he said, “that you have not put off the heart of the Christian with the clothing of the Spaniard.” Perhaps his words were the less gentle from the state of irritation in which his mind had been left by his recent altercation with Diego. “I am clothed as my fathers were,” José answered. “I am no Spaniard; I am a Child of the Sun.” “You should be ashamed to recall those heathenish fables,” the monk returned. “Have I to repeat to _you_, after seven years of careful instruction, that the sun is nothing but a ball of fire, made by God to give light to the earth, and for that purpose travelling round it every day?” “I don’t know what Ynty is. I know what the Spaniards are; and may Ynty slay me with his arrows if henceforward I wear their dress or learn their ways!” José flung out his words with eager, sharp abruptness, naturally increased by the difficulty with which, in a moment of excitement, he translated his rapid thoughts from Quichua into Spanish. “José! José!” cried the monk, in angry amazement; “is this the reward of all the love and care I lavished on you?” “I have no wish to grieve _you_, patre,” said the youth, in a softened tone. “No wish to grieve me!—yet your words are enough to bring down God’s vengeance on us both. Go to! You disappoint me, José. You are like all the rest—ungrateful.” Words such as these would have brought the docile, affectionate José of six months ago to his knees, to ask forgiveness with tears. But Viracocha stood erect and motionless; in Fray Fernando’s eyes, a bronze statue of defiance. Yet, unseen by Fray Fernando, there was a quivering of the lip, a gathering mist in the eye. “Patre,” he said at length, “if you will only listen.” Here he faltered—stopped—and began his sentence again in a different form. “Patre, hear what I have seen and heard, and then tell me if I ought to speak the tongue or worship the gods of the race who are trampling my people into dust.” “Nothing you have seen or heard can excuse the insolent tone you have thought proper to assume,” said the monk. He continued, however, in a voice less firm, even almost hesitating—“I do not deny that there have been many instances of oppression; but still—”