“Tell my mother, Lucia wants her,” she said in Spanish to a novice whom she happened to meet; for Sumac and Coyllur had been taught Spanish by the nuns. They had also their Christian names, used seldom amongst themselves, but often in their intercourse with the Spaniards. Sumac’s was Lucia, Coyllur’s Victoria. The novice, to whom she was well known, led her at once into a parlour, saying, “I will tell Sister Maria.” Sumac waited a while, first seated on a bench, then standing to gaze, with much admiration, on a very indifferent painting, in her eyes a wonderful work of art, representing Christ blessing the little children. Ere long a worn and faded woman, in a dark serge robe, entered the room. She was not young, she was not beautiful—perhaps she had never been so; but when she looked at the Indian girl, there was a yearning, motherly tenderness in her face, which it may be the angels think a fairer thing than what we call beauty. As she folded the slight form in an affectionate embrace, she exclaimed sorrowfully, “My poor child is almost a shadow now. I sometimes fear, Lucia, that you will soon vanish from our sight altogether.” “And what if I do, mother?” asked the girl, seating herself beside her, and gazing fondly into her dim blue eyes with dark ones that were all too perilously bright. “Since they slew the Inca, I have not wished to live. Tell me, mother, is that also sin?” Sister Maria sighed, as she answered, “It is always sin, my child, if we love the creature more than the Creator.” Sumac crossed herself, and pointed to the picture. “You told me He takes away sin; you said He died for our sins on the cross.” Amidst much darkness, ignorance, and confusion, that one grand and simple truth had found its way, like healing balm, into the crushed heart of the Indian girl; for Sister Maria, having learned that truth herself, was able to teach it. In early days—days far off, and tenderly remembered now—some pure and unadulterated drops of the water of life had fallen to her lot through the ministrations of the celebrated Fray Constantine Ponce de la Fuente, in Seville. Many years since then had she lived “in a dry and thirsty land where no water is,” yet, like the lotus flower, she had treasured up a little store of the precious liquid, enough to quench the thirst of a weary wanderer in the desert. Thus it was that, happily, one poor mourner was not bid to look, as too many were, for comfort, to the “Madre Dolorosa,” our Lady of Sorrows, but to the Man of Sorrows Himself, who is also the Lord of Life and Glory. Half unconsciously, Sister Maria murmured a few lines of the noble old Latin hymn, “Dies Iræ.” “What do those words say, mother?” Sumac asked. The nun gave a free Spanish translation of them, somewhat resembling ours:— “Think, O Saviour, for what reason Thou endured’st earth’s pain and treason Do not lose me in that season.” But Sumac did not approve.