“Why, Padre?” she whispered.
His mother’s face hovered before him in the dim light. Behind her a mitered head, symbolizing the Church, nodded and beckoned significantly. Back of them, as they stood between him and the girl, he saw the glorified vision of Carmen. It was his problem. He turned wearily from it to the gentle presence at his side.
“Why, Padre dear?” came again the soft question.
“I stay––to work out––my problem,” was his scarcely audible reply.
The girl did not speak. But her breath came more quickly, and her hand closed more tightly about his.
“Dearest one,” he murmured, bending over the brown curls, “it is God’s way, I guess. Perhaps in the years which I have spent here with you I have had the time and the opportunity to work out my salvation. I am sure that I have. But, though I strove in my way, I could not quickly acquire your spirituality. I could not at once shake loose those poisonous thoughts of a lifetime, which have at last become externalized in separation from all that I hold dearest in this life, you, my beloved girl, you.” He buried his face in her luxuriant hair and strove to hold back the rush of scalding tears.
“It but shows how poisonous thoughts separate us from all that is good––even from God,” he continued in a choked voice. “Oh, my sweet girl, I love you as it seems to me no human being could love another! It has been so from that first day when, a mere babe, your wonderful eyes held me until I could read in them a depth of love for mankind that was divine.” It did not seem to him that a mature man was speaking to a mere girl. She seemed, as always, ages beyond him in wisdom and experience.
Carmen reached up and wound her arms about his neck. He bent low and kissed her brow. Then he drew himself up quickly and resumed his broken talk.
“I believed at first that my salvation lay in you. And so it did, for from your clear thought I gleaned my first satisfying knowledge of the great principle, God. But alas! I could not seem to realize that between recognizing righteousness as ‘right-thinking’ and daily practicing it so as to ‘prove’ God there was a great difference. And so I rested easy in my first gleams of truth, expecting that they would so warm my soul that it would expand of itself out of all error.”