This was
easy enough, as he constituted himself from that moment its sole nurse
and attendant, and boldly baptized it among the other children by the
name of Francisco. No others knew its origin, nor cared to know. Father
Pedro had taken a muchacho foundling for adoption; his jealous seclusion
of it and his personal care was doubtless some sacerdotal formula at
once high and necessary.
He remembered with darkening eyes and impeded breath how his close
companionship and daily care of this helpless child had revealed to him
the fascinations of that paternity denied to him; how he had deemed it
his duty to struggle against the thrill of baby fingers laid upon his
yellow cheeks, the pleading of inarticulate words, the eloquence of
wonder-seeing and mutely questioning eyes; how he had succumbed
again and again, and then struggled no more, seeing only in them the
suggestion of childhood made incarnate in the Holy Babe. And yet, even
as he thought, he drew from his gown a little shoe, and laid it beside
his breviary.
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