Not a vague visitation of Grace, not a formless sense of Peace; but an Answer, something real, even if the reality were fancied, a voice out of the night, responding to his, a hand in the dark clasping his groping fingers, a breath, human, warm, fragrant, familiar, like a soft, sweet caress on his shrunken cheeks.

Alone there in the dim half-light of the decaying Mission, with its crumbling plaster, its naive crudity of ornament and picture, he wrestled fiercely with his desires--words, fragments of sentences, inarticulate, incoherent, wrenched from his tight-shut teeth.
But the Answer was not in the church.

Above him, over the high altar, the Virgin in a glory, with downcast eyes and folded hands, grew vague and indistinct in the shadow, the colours fading, tarnished by centuries of incense smoke.

The Christ in agony on the Cross was but a lamentable vision of tormented anatomy, grey flesh, spotted with crimson.

The St.
John, the San Juan Bautista, patron saint of the Mission, the gaunt figure in skins, two fingers upraised in the gesture of benediction, gazed stolidly out into the half-gloom under the ceiling, ignoring the human distress that beat itself in vain against the altar rail below, and Angele remained as before--only a memory, far distant, intangible, lost.
Vanamee rose, turning his back upon the altar with a vague gesture of despair.