With her exit from the beau monde and her entrance upon the broad stage of University life, Carmen seemed to have awakened from the lethargy which her abrupt transition from mediaeval SimitÍ into the modern world had occasioned. The static struggle to hold her own against the rushing currents of materialism had turned at length in her favor. Her lamp had been kept alight. The lethal influences which rose about her like stupifying fumes in the courts of fashion had been lifted and swept away by the fresher and more invigorating breezes into which her bark had now been drawn.

She plunged into her new work joyously; yet not without a deeper comprehension of its meaning than that of her fellow-students. She knew that the University was but another stepping-stone, even as her social life had been; another series of calls and opportunities to “prove” her God to be immanent good. And she thankfully accepted its offerings. For she was keenly alive to the materialistic leadings of the “higher education,” and she would stand as a living protest against them.

It had not taken her long to discover the impotence lying at the heart of so-called modern education. She had not been slow to mark the disappointment written upon the faces of many of her fellow-students, who had sought in vain a great awakening light in those sacred precincts of learning, but, their confidence betrayed, were now floundering in the devouring morass of materialism. To her keen insight the University stood revealed as the great panderer to this latest century’s obsessing idea that the true function of education is expressed in the imparting of changing, human information and a training for the business of earning one’s daily bread according to the infamous code of the world’s carnal social system. The University did not meet the most urgent need of the race by equipping men to stand against the great crises of human experience. It did not teach men to lay aside the counterfeit man of material sense; but rather emphasized the world’s belief in the reality of this man by minutely detailed courses in his mundane history and the manifestations of his pitiable ignorance in his wanton crimes and watery ambitions. To Carmen, God was the most insistent fact of creation. And mankind’s existence could find its only justification in ceaseless, consecrated manifestation of His harmonious activity. True, the University vaguely recognized God as infinitely competent. 27 But in the same breath it confessed its utter ignorance of a demonstrable knowledge of Him, to know whom alone is life. True, these men of worldly learning prayed. But their hollow prayers bore no hope, for they knew not how to gain answers to them.

And yet the girl remained in her new environment, awaiting the call to “come up higher.” And meantime she strove to gain daily a wider knowledge of the Christ-principle, and its application to the needs and problems of her fellow-men. Her business was the reflection of her Father’s business. Other ambition she had none. The weak, transient, flighty, so-called intellectual life which she saw about her sent no call across the calm currents of her thought. Her education was religious in the strictest, deepest sense, for she was learning to know God.

Though the girl pursued her way quietly, unwilling that the notoriety which had been fastened upon her should mark her as an object of curiosity, yet her story soon spread among University circles, and the first semester was a scant two weeks old before her name had been debated in the numerous Sororities and Women’s Clubs, and quietly dropped. Negro blood coursed in her veins; and the stigma of parental disgrace lay dark upon her. She lived with a woman of blackened reputation––a reputation which waxed no brighter under the casual, malicious comments of J. Wilton Ames, whose great financial strength had made him a Trustee of this institution of learning. If Carmen divined the comment that was passed concerning herself, she gave no indication. But Hitt and Father Waite knew that the girl had not found favor in the social and fraternal organizations of her mates; and they knew why.

“A curse upon such little minds!” mused Hitt, when he could no longer restrain himself. Then he called a student to his desk one day, at the conclusion of his lecture.

“Miss West,” he said, “you are leader in the most prominent Sorority in the University. I want you to give Miss Carmen Ariza a bid.”

The girl shook her head. “She is not desirable.”

“But the charges against her are unfounded! They are flagrantly false!” stormed Hitt.

“Have you proof, Professor?” the girl asked, as she arched her brows.

“None definite. But––well, what if she were a negress? Hers is the most brilliant mind in the entire student-body!”

But, no. Race segregation is a divine tenet, scripturally justified. What though the girl’s skin vied with the lilies and rosebuds? What though her hair was the brown of ripe 28 fields? Had not God Almighty decreed that the negro should remain a drawer of water? A hewer of wood? Had the Lord designed him the equal of the noble white, He would have bleached his face, and bridged his flat nose. Miss West was a Southerner. And the reference to her dark-skinned sisters caused a little moue of disgust, as she flatly declined to consider Carmen an eligible candidate for membership in her Society.

“Lord above!” ejaculated Hitt, who had been brooding over the incident as he walked home with Father Waite. “That toadying, sycophantic, wealth-worshiping Miss West can see no farther than the epidermis! If we could have maintained Carmen’s reputation as an Inca princess, this same girl would have fawned at her feet, and begged to kiss the edge of her robe! And she would have used every art of cajolery to ingratiate herself into Carmen’s favor, to catch the social crumbs that our girl might chance to drop!”

“There, there, Hitt,” soothed Father Waite. “Have you any idea that Carmen is at all injured by Miss West’s supercilious conduct?”

“Not in the least!” asseverated Hitt vigorously. “But it makes me so––!”

“There, check that! You’re forgetting the girl’s influence, aren’t you?”

Hitt gulped his wrath down his long throat. “Waite,” he blurted, “that girl’s an angel! She isn’t real!”

“Oh, yes, she is!” replied Father Waite. “She’s so real that we don’t understand her––so real that she has been totally misunderstood by the petty minds that have sought to crush her here in New York, that’s all.”

“But certainly she is unique––”

“Ah, yes; unique in that she goes about putting her arms around people and telling them that she loves them. Yes, that certainly is unique! And she is unique in that her purity and goodness hang about her like an exquisite aura, and make people instinctively turn and look after her as she passes. Unique in that in her sweet presence one seems to hear a strain of heavenly music vibrating on the air. So unique that the dawn, the nesting birds, the wild flowers, the daily sunset, fairly intoxicate her with ecstasy and make her life a lyric.”

Hitt essayed to reply; but the words hung in his throat.

“Yes,” continued Father Waite, “she is so unique that when the empty-headed, vain young Duke of Altern, learning that she had been thrown out of society because of the base rumor regarding her parentage, sent her a written statement to the effect that there was no engagement between them, and demanded 29 that she sign it, she did so, with a happy smile, with an invocation, with a prayer for blessing upon those who had tried to ruin her.”

“Good God! Did she do that?”

“Aye, she did. And when Mrs. Hawley-Crowles and Ames and Lafelle filched La Libertad from her, she would have given them the clothes on her back with it, if they had demanded them. Yes, she’s unique––so unique that again and again I hear her murmur, as she looks off absently into space: ‘If it is right that he should have a son, then I want it to be so.’”

“Referring to––that priest––JosÈ de RincÓn?”

“Yes, doubtless. And time and again I have heard her say: ‘God is light. Sight depends upon light. Therefore Anita’s babe sees.’ Old Rosendo’s grandson, you know.”

Hitt nodded. “Waite,” he said earnestly, “she is simply illustrating what would happen to any of us if we threw ourselves wholly upon God’s protecting care, and took our thoughts only from Him. That’s why she can lose her home, her family, her reputation, that mine––everything––and still stand. She does what we don’t dare to do!”

“She is a living illustration,” replied Father Waite, “of the mighty fact that there is nothing so practical as real Christianity. I want you to tell Professor Cane that. He calls her ‘the girl with the Utopian views,’ because of her ingenuous replies in his sociological class. But I want you to show him that she is very far from being impractical.”

“I’ll do it,” said Hitt emphatically. “I’ll prove to Cane that her religion is not a visionary scheme for regulating a world inhabited only by perfect beings, but is a working principle for the every-day sinner to use in the solution of his daily problems. Moreover, Waite, she is a vivid illustration of the fact that when the individual improves, the nation does likewise. Do you get me?”

“I not only get you, but I stand as a proof of your statement,” returned Father Waite gently.

Carmen, her thoughts above, though her feet trod the earth, came and went, glad and happy. The change in her mode of living from the supreme luxury of the Hawley-Crowles mansion to the common comforts of the home where now she dwelt so simply with the Beaubien, seemed not to have caused even a ripple in the full current of her joy. Her life was a symphony of thanksgiving; an antiphony, in which all Nature voiced its responses to her in a diapason, full, rich, and harmonious. Often that autumn she might have been seen standing among the tinted leaves on the college campus, and drinking in 30 their silent message. And then she might have been heard to exclaim, as she turned her rapt gaze beyond the venerable, vine-clad buildings: “Oh, I feel as if I just couldn’t stand it, all this wealth of beauty, of love, of boundless good!” And yet she was alone, always alone. For her dark story had reared a hedge about her; the taboo rested upon her; and even in the crowded classrooms the schoolmates of her own sex looked askance and drew their skirts about them.

But if the students avoided her, the faculty did not. And those like Professor Cane, who had the opportunity and the ability to peer into the depths of the girl’s soul, took an immediate and increasing interest in her. Often her own naÏve manners broke down the bars of convention, and brought her enduring friendships among the men of learning. This was especially the case with Doctor Morton, Dean of the School of Surgery. Yielding to a harmless impulse of curiosity, the girl one afternoon had set out on a trip of exploration, and had chosen the Anatomy building to begin with. Many odd sights greeted her eager gaze as she peered into classrooms and exhibit cases; but she met with no one until she chanced to open the door of Doctor Morton’s private laboratory, and found that eminent man bending over a human brain, which he was dissecting.

Carmen stopped, and stood hesitant. The doctor looked up, surprise written large upon his features as he noted his fair caller. “Well!” he said, laying down his work.

“Well!” returned Carmen. “That sounds like the Indian ‘How?’ doesn’t it?” Then both laughed.

“You––are––Doctor Morton?” queried the girl, twisting around and looking at the name on the door to make certain.

“Yes,” replied the genial doctor, with growing interest. He was a gray-haired, elderly man, slightly inclined to embonpoint, and with keen, twinkling eyes. “Will you come in?”

“Yes, indeed,” returned the girl; “I’d love to. I am Carmen Ariza.”

“Ah, yes. The young South American––lady. I have heard of you.”

“Most everybody seems to have heard of me,” sighed the girl. “Well, it doesn’t make any difference about my coming in here, does it?” She looked up at him so wistfully that he felt a great tug at his heartstrings.

“Not a bit!” he replied cordially. “You’re as welcome as the April sun.”

She seized his hand and pressed it. “Now tell me,” she said eagerly, looking about. “What are you doing? What’s that thing?”

“That,” said he, taking up the pulpy gray object, “is the brain of my erstwhile friend and collaborator, Doctor Bolton. He willed it to the University.”

“Alas, poor Yorick!” murmured Carmen, a facetious twinkle coming into her eyes as she looked at it. “And why are you cutting it up?”

“In the interests of science,” returned the man, studying her. “That we may increase our knowledge of this marvelous mechanism of thought, and the laws by which it operates in mental processes.”

“Then you still blindly seek the living among the dead, don’t you?” she murmured. “You think that this poor thing held life, and you search now among its ashes for the living principle. But, God is life; and ‘Canst thou by searching find out God?’”

The man regarded her intently without replying. She bent for a while over the half-dissected brain in deep thought. Then she looked up.

“Doctor,” she said, “life is not structural. God is life; and to know Him is to reflect life. Reflecting Him, we are immortal. Doctor, don’t you think it is about time to do away with this business of dying?”

The man of science started visibly, and his eyes opened wider. The abrupt question quite swept him off his feet.

“You didn’t really expect to find anything in this brain, did you?” she went on. “The brain is composed of––what?”

“Why, mostly water, with a few commonplace salts,” he answered, wondering what the next question would be.

“And can a compound of water and a few commonplace salts think?” she asked, looking intently at him.

“N––no,” he answered tentatively.

“The brain is not the cause of thought, then, but an effect, is it not?” she pursued.

“Why, really, my dear Miss Carmen, we don’t know. We call it the organ of thought, because in some way thought seems to be associated with it, rather than with––well, with the liver, or muscles, for example. And we learn that certain classes of mental disturbances are intimately associated with lesions or clots in the brain. That’s about all.”

The girl reflected for a few moments. Then:

“Doctor, you wouldn’t cut up a machine to discover the motive power, would you? But that is just what you are doing there with that brain. You are hoping by dissecting it to find the power that made it go, aren’t you? And the power that made it go was mind––life.”

“But the life is not in the brain now,” hazarded the doctor.

“And never was,” returned Carmen promptly. “You see,” she went on, “if the brain was ever alive, it could never cease to be so. If it ever lived, it could never die. That brain never manifested real life. It manifested only a false sense of life. And that false sense died. Who or what says that the man who owned that brain is dead? Why, the human mind––human belief. It is the human mind, expressing its belief in death, and in a real opposite to life, or God. Don’t you see?”

“H’m!” The doctor regarded the girl queerly. She returned his look with a confident smile.

“You believe in evolution, don’t you?” she at length continued.

“Oh, surely,” he replied unhesitatingly. “There is overwhelming evidence of it.”

“Well, then, in the process of evolution, which was evolved first, the brain, or the mind which operates it and through it?” she asked.

“Why,” he replied meditatively, “it is quite likely that they evolved simultaneously, the brain being the mind’s organ of expression.”

“But don’t you see, Doctor, that you are now making the mind really come first? For that which expresses a thing is always secondary to the thing expressed.”

“Well, perhaps so,” he said. “At any rate, it is quite immaterial to a practical knowledge of how to meet the brain’s ills. I am a practical man, you know.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said simply. “Practical men are so stupid and ignorant.”

“Well, I declare!” he exclaimed, putting his hands on his hips and staring down at the smiling face.

“And you are so nice and friendly, I wouldn’t want to think you stupid and ignorant,” she went on blandly.

“H’m! Well, that kind o’ takes the edge off your former classification of me,” he said, greatly amused, yet wondering just what appraisal to place upon this frank girl.

“And evolution,” she continued, “is an unfolding, isn’t it? You see, the great fact of creation is the creator, infinite mind. Well, that mind expresses itself in its ideas. And these it is unfolding all the time. Now a fact always gives rise to a suppositional opposite. The opposite of a fact is an error. And that is why error has been called ‘negative truth.’ Of course, there isn’t any such thing as negative truth! And so all error is simply falsity, supposition, without real existence. Do you see?”

He did not reply. But she went on unperturbed. “Now, the human, or carnal, mind is the negative truth of the real mind, 33 God. It is infinite mind’s suppositional opposite. And it imitates the infinite mind, but in a very stupid, blundering way. And so the whole physical universe manifests evolution, too––an unfolding, or revealing, of material types, or mental concepts. And all these manifest the human mind’s sense of life, and its equally strong sense of death. The universe, animals, men, are all human types, evolved, or unfolded, or revealed, in the human mind. And all are the human mind’s interpretations of infinite mind’s real and eternal and perfect ideas. You see that, don’t you?

“You know,” she laughed, “speaking of ‘negative truth’, the first chapter of Genesis sets forth positive truth, and the second chapter sets forth its opposite, negative truth. It is very odd, isn’t it? But there it is for everybody to read. And the human mind, of course, true to its beliefs, clings to the second chapter as the reality. Isn’t it strange?”

Meantime, Carmen’s attention had been attracted to a large microscope that stood on the table near her. Going to it, she peeped curiously down into the tube. “Well, what have you here?” she inquired.

“Germs,” he said mechanically.

“Germs! What funny, twisted things! Well,” she suddenly asked, “have you got the fear germ here?”

He broke into a laugh. But when the girl looked up, her face was quite serious.

“You do not know it, Doctor, for you are a practical man, but you haven’t anything but fear germs under this glass,” she said in a low voice.

“Why, those are germs of typhoid and tuberculosis!” he exclaimed.

“And manifestations, externalizations, of the fear germ itself, which is mental,” she added. “These things don’t cause disease,” she went on, pointing to the slide. “But the thoughts which they manifest do. Do you scientists know why people die, Doctor?”

“No,” he admitted seriously. “We really do not know why people die.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” she said. “It’s because they don’t know enough to live. This poor Doctor Bolton died because he didn’t know that God was life. He committed sickness, and then paid the penalty, death. He sinned by believing that there were other powers than God, by believing that life and thought were in matter. And so he paid the wages of sin, death. He simply missed the mark, that’s all.”

She turned and perched herself upon the table. “You haven’t asked me to sit down,” she commented brightly. “But, if you don’t mind, I will.” 34

“I––I beg your pardon!” the doctor exclaimed, coloring, and hastily setting out a chair. “I really was so interested in what you were saying that I forgot my manners.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head as she declined the proffered chair, “I’ll sit here, so’s I can look straight into your eyes. You go ahead and cut up poor Yorick, and I’ll talk.”

The doctor laughed again. “You are much more interesting,” he returned, “than poor Bolton, dead or alive. In fact, he really was quite a bore. But you are like a sparkling mountain rill, even if you do give me a severe classification.”

“Well,” she replied, “then you are honestly more interested in life than in death, are you?”

“Why, most assuredly!” he said.

“So am I, much! Death is such a mistake; and I haven’t a bit of use for it,” she continued. “It’s like making mistakes in music, or mathematics. Now when we make mistakes in those, we never stop to discuss them. We correct them. But, dear me! The world has nearly talked its poor old head off about the mistakes of sickness and death. It never seems to occur to the world that Jesus always associated sickness with sin. You know, the Rabbis of his day seem to have hit upon a great truth, although they didn’t make it really practical. They maintained that a sick man could not be healed of his diseases until all his sins had been forgiven. And so they attempted to forgive sins and make men clean by their elaborate ceremonies. But they missed the mark, too. And nobody got to the root of the difficulty until Jesus came. He forgave sin by destroying it completely. And that cured the disease that was the manifestation of sin. Now I ask, why do you, nearly two thousand years after his time, still do as the old Rabbis did, and continue to treat the body––the effect––instead of the mental cause? But,” looking down in meditation, “I suppose if you did that the people would cry, ‘He hath a devil!’ They thought I was a witch in SimitÍ.”

“H’m!” returned the doctor. “Then you do not believe that disease is caused by microbes, I take it?”

“Disease caused by microbes? Yes, so it is. And the microbe? It is a manifestation of the human mind again. And, as with typhoid fever, diphtheria, and other diseases, the human mind applies its own cherished, ignorant beliefs in certain methods, and then renders innocuous its own manifestations, microbes. The human mind makes its own diseases, and then in some cases removes the disease, but still by human, material methods. Its reliefs are only temporary. At last it yields itself to its false beliefs, and then goes out in what it calls death. It is all a mental process––all human thought and its various 35 manifestations. Now why not get beyond microbes and reach the cause, even of them, the human mind itself? Jesus did. Paul did. Others have done so. Why do not you men of science do likewise?”

Doctor Morton himself took the chair which he had set out for the girl. “What you say,” he replied slowly, “is not new to me. But I can only answer that the world is not ready yet for the great change which you suggest.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “What cant! What mesmerism you are laboring under! Was the world ready for Jesus?”

“No. He came too soon. Events show that.”

“Well, then, would he be accepted to-day, if he had not come before?”

“I can not say. But––I think he would not.”

“And I quite agree with you,” she said firmly. “Now the world has doctored for more than four thousand years, despite the fact that health is not sold in bottle or pill form. Doctor, what does the history of all these centuries of drugging show you?”

He hesitated. Carmen waited a moment; then continued:

“Don’t they demonstrate the absolute inability of medicines to cure disease?” she asked. “Any more than putting men in prison cures crime?” she added as an afterthought.

“They at least prove that medication has not permanently removed disease,” he ventured, not wishing to go too far.

“Doctor,” she said earnestly, “that man Jesus, who, according to you, came too soon, said: ‘Without me ye can do nothing.’ Well, didn’t he come very, very close to the truth when he made that statement? He did not say that without drugs or material remedies we could do nothing, but that without the Christ-principle mankind would continue, as before, to miss the mark. He showed that disease and discord result from sin. Sin is lack of righteousness, lack of right-thinking about things. It is wrong belief, false thought. Sin is mental. Its effect, disease, is mental––a state of discordant consciousness. Can you with drugs change a state of mind?”

“Certainly,” he replied quickly. “Whiskey and opium cause changes in one’s state of mind.”

“No,” she answered. “But the human belief of power inherent in whiskey and opium, or of the human body’s reaction to them, causes a change in the human thought-activity that is called consciousness. The state of human consciousness changes with the belief, but not the real state of mind. Can you not see that? And Doctor Bolton––”

“Bolton was not sick. He died of natural causes, old age, and general breakdown,” was the doctor’s refuge.

Carmen laughed and sprang down from the table. “What an obstinately obdurate lot you scientific men are!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you know that you doctors are only a development of the old ‘medicine-man’? Now in the first place, Mr. Bolton isn’t dead; and, in the second, there are no natural causes of death. Old age? Why, that’s gone out of fashion, long since.”

“You deny senile changes––?”

“I deny every human error!” she interrupted.

“Then,” with a note of banter in his voice, “I take it that you do not expect to die.”

“I do not!” she replied emphatically. “I expect good, nothing but good, ever! Don’t you know that physiologists themselves admit that the human body is composed of eighty-five per cent water and fifteen per cent ordinary salts? Can such a combination have intelligence and sensation? Do you still believe that life is dependent upon lungs, stomach, or liver? Why, the so-called ‘unit cell’ breathes, digests, and manifests life-functions, and yet it has no lungs, no mouth, no stomach, no organs. It is the human mind, assuming knowledge and power which it does not possess, that says the sense of life shall depend upon such organs in the one case and not in the other. And the human mind could be utterly refuted if men would only learn to use the Christ-principle. Jesus and Paul used it, and proved material laws to be only false beliefs.”

“Well,” he replied meditatively, “if you are correct, then the preachers are way off the track. And I have long since come to the conclusion that––Well,” changing abruptly back to the previous topic, “so you refute the microbe theory, eh?”

“I said I did and did not,” she laughed. “Listen: fear, worry, hatred, malice, murder, all of which are mental things in themselves, manifest to the human mind as microbes. These are the hurtful microbes, and they produce toxins, which poison the system. What is the cure? Antitoxins? No, indeed! Jesus gave the real and permanent cure. It is the Christ-principle. Now you can learn that principle, and how to apply it. But if you don’t care to, why, then you must go on with your material microbes and poisons, and with your diseases and death, until you are ready to leave them and turn to that which is real. For all human-mind activity and manifestation, whether in microbes, death, or life, is mental, and is but the counterfeit of the real activity of divine mind, God.

“Do you know,” she pursued earnestly, “I heard a lecture the other day in which it was said that life is a sort of fermentation in the body. Well, as regards human life, I guess that is so. For the human body is only a manifestation of the human 37 mind; and the human mind surely is in a continuous state of ferment!”

She paused and laughed. “The lecturer,” she continued, “said that the range of life was from ultra-microbe to man, and that Shakespeare began as a single cell. Think of it! The mundane concept of Shakespeare’s body may have unfolded from a cell-concept; but Shakespeare was a manifestation of mind! And that mind was an interpretation, though very imperfect, of the mind that is God. Why can’t you materialists raise your eyes above the dust? Why, you would choke the very avenues of the spirit with mud!”

“H’m! Well, your education seems to be––”

“Yes,” she interrupted, “my education is beyond the vagaries that are so generally taught in the name of knowledge. Intellectual education is a farce. It does nothing for mankind, except to give them a false culture. Were the so-called great men of the past really educated? Here is an extract which I copied this afternoon from Hawthorne.” She opened her note book and read:

“‘Ah, but there is a half-acknowledged melancholy like to this when we stand in the perfected vigor of our life and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers, and that the next work of his never-idle fingers must be to steal them one by one away.’

“Now,” she asked, “was that man really educated? In current theology, yes. But that theology could not solve his least earthly problem, nor meet his slightest need! Oh, what inexpressibly sad lives so many of your greatest men have lived! Your Hawthorne, your Longfellow, they yearned for the rest which they were taught was to follow death. They were the victims of false theology. They were mesmerized. If they believed in the Christ––and they thought they did––why, then, did they not rise up and do as he bade them do, put death out? He taught no such resignation to human beliefs as they practiced! He showed men how to overcome the world. Why do we not try to overcome it? Has the time not come? Is the world not sufficiently weary of dying?”

He looked at her intently for some moments. She seemed, as she stood there before him, like a thing of gossamer and sunshine that had drifted into his laboratory, despite the closed door.

“Say,” he suddenly exclaimed, as a new thought struck him, “I’d like to have you talk with my friend, Reverend Patterson Moore! Pat and I have barked at each other for many years now, and I’m getting tired. I’d like to shift him to a younger and more vigorous opponent. I believe you’ve been providentially sent to relieve me.”

“Well,” she acquiesced. “You can tell Professor Hitt, and––”

“Hitt, eh? You know him?”

“Yes, indeed! He comes often to our house. He is very much interested in these things that you and I have been talking about to-day. We have regular meetings, with Father Waite, and Mr. Haynerd, and––”

“Well, no wonder you can argue! You’ve had practice, it seems. But––suppose I have Hitt bring me to one of your meetings, eh?”

“Do!” cried the girl. “And bring your Reverend Pat.”

The genial doctor laughed long and incontinently. “I imagine Reverend Pat wouldn’t thank you for referring to him that way,” he said. “He is a very high Anglican, and his dignity is marvelous––to say nothing of his self-esteem. Well, we’ll see, we’ll see. But, don’t go yet! We’re just getting acquainted.”

“I must,” replied the girl. “I didn’t really mean to come in here, you know. But I guess I was led, don’t you?”

And when the door had closed upon her, the doctor sat silently beside the pulseless brain of his deceased comrade and pondered long.

When Carmen entered the house, late that afternoon, she found the Beaubien in conversation with Professor Williams, of the University School of Music. That gentleman had learned through Hitt of the girl’s unusual voice, and had dropped in on his way home to ask that he might hear and test it. With only a smile for reply, Carmen tossed her books and hat upon the sofa and went directly to the piano, where she launched into the weird Indian lament which had produced such an astounding effect upon her chance visitors at the Elwin school that day long gone, and which had been running in her thought and seeking expression ever since her conversation with Doctor Morton a short while before.

For a full half hour she sang, lost in the harmony that poured from her soul. Father Waite entered, and quietly took a seat. She did not see him. Song after song, most of them the characteristic soft melodies of her people, and many her own simple improvisations, issued from the absorbed girl’s lips. The Beaubien rose and stole softly from the room. Father Waite sat with his head resting on his hand, striving to interpret the message which welled from the depths of his own being, where hidden, unused chords were vibrating in unison with those of this young girl.

Then, abruptly, the singing stopped, and Carmen turned and 39 faced her auditors. “There,” she said, with a happy sigh, “that just had to come out!”

Professor Williams rose and took her hand. “Who, may I ask, was your teacher?” he said, in a voice husky with emotion.

Carmen smiled up at him. “No human teacher,” she said gently.

A look of astonishment came into the man’s face. He turned to Father Waite inquiringly. The latter nodded his confirmation of the girl’s words.

“Well!” exclaimed the professor. “I wonder if you realize what you have got, Miss Carmen?”

“Yes,” she replied simply. “It’s a beautiful gift, isn’t it?”

“But––I had thought of asking you to let me train you––but––I––I dare not undertake to handle such a voice as yours. May I––may I send Maitre Rossanni to you, the great Italian? Will you sing for him?”

“Oh, yes,” returned the girl; “I’ll sing for anybody. The gift isn’t mine, you know. It is for all. I’m only the channel.”

When the professor had taken his reluctant departure, the Beaubien returned and handed Carmen a letter. With a cry of joy the girl seized it and tore it open. It was from Colombia, the second one that her beloved Rosendo had succeeded in getting down the river to the distant coast. It had been written three months prior, and it bore many stains and evidences of the vicissitudes through which it had emerged. Yes, Rosendo and his family were well, though still at Maria Rosa, far up the Boque, with Don NicolÁs. The war raged below them, but they were safe.

“And not a word from Padre JosÈ, or about him,” murmured the girl, sinking into a chair and clasping the soiled letter to her breast.

Father Waite thought of the little newsboy of Cartagena, and his possible share in the cause of JosÈ’s silence. But he made no comment.