The girl stood looking at him wistfully. Then her sober little face melted in smiles. With childish impulsiveness she clambered into his lap, and twining her arms about his neck, impressed a kiss upon his cheek.
“I love you, Padre,” she murmured; “and you love me, don’t you?”
He pressed her to him, startled though he was. “God knows I do, little one!” he exclaimed.
“Of course He does,” she eagerly agreed; “and He knows you don’t want to teach me anything that isn’t true, doesn’t He, Padre dear?”
Yea, and more; for Josè was realizing now, what he had not seen before, that it was beyond his power to teach her that which was not true. The magnitude and sacredness of his task impressed him as never before. His puzzled brain grappled feebly with the enormous problem. She had rebuked him for trying to teach her things which, if he accepted the immanence of God as fact, her logic had shown him were utterly false. Clearly the grooves in which this child’s pure thought ran were not his own. And if she would not think as he did, what recourse was there left him but to accept the alternative and think with her? For he would not, even if he could, force upon her his own thought-processes.
“Then, Carmen,” he finally ventured, “you do not wish to learn about people and what they have done and are doing in the big world about you?”
“Oh, yes, Padre; tell me all about the good things they did!”
“But they did many wicked things too, chiquita. And the good and the bad are all mixed up together.”
“No,” she shook her head vigorously; “there isn’t any bad. There is only good, for God is everywhere––isn’t He?”
She raised up and looked squarely into the priest’s eyes. Dissimulation, hypocrisy, quibble, cant––nothing but fearless truth could meet that gaze.