She rose quickly. “Gladly, Padre––but where?”
“God only knows––to the end of the world!” cried the frenzied man.
“Well, Padre dear,” she softly replied, as she smiled up into his drawn face, “we will start out. But I think we had better rest when we reach the shales, don’t you?”
Then she put her hand in his.
CHAPTER 35
“No, Padre dear,” with an energetic shake of her head, “no. Not even after all that has seemed to happen to us do I believe it true. No, I do not believe it real. Evil is not power. It does not exist, excepting in the human mind. And that, as you yourself know, can not be real, for it is all that God is not.”
They were seated beneath the slowly withering algarroba tree out on the burning shales. Josè still held the girl’s hand tightly in his. Again he was struggling with self, struggling to pass the borderline from, self-consciousness to God-consciousness; striving, under the spiritual influence of this girl, to break the mesmeric hold of his own mortal beliefs, and swing freely out into his true orbit about the central Sun, infinite Mind.
The young girl, burgeoning into a marvelous womanhood, sat before him like an embodied spirit. Her beauty of soul shone out in gorgeous luxuriance, and seemed to him to envelop her in a sheen of radiance. The brilliant sunshine glanced sparkling from her glossy hair into a nimbus of light about her head. Her rich complexion was but faintly suggestive to him of a Latin origin. Her oval face and regular features might have indicated any of the ruddier branches of the so-called Aryan stock. But his thought was not dwelling on these things now. It was brooding over the events of the past few weeks, and their probable consequences. And this he had just voiced to her.