“Senora, it was a fool’s paradise that Stewart lived in.  I saw him, often.  When he took me up into the mountains to have me marry that wayward Bonita and her lover I came to have respect for a man whose ideas about nature and life and God were at a variance with mine.  But the man is a worshiper of God in all material things.  He is a part of the wind and sun and desert and mountain that have made him.  I have never heard more beautiful words than those in which he persuaded Bonita to accept Senor Mains, to forget her old lovers, and henceforth to be happy.  He is their friend.  I wish I could tell you what that means.  It sounds so simple.  It is really simple.  All great things are so.  For Senor Stewart it was natural to be loyal to his friend, to have a fine sense of the honor due to a woman who had loved and given, to bring about their marriage, to succor them in their need and loneliness.  It was natural for him never to speak of them.  It would have been natural for him to give his life in their defense if peril menaced them.  Senora, I want you to understand that to me the man has the same stability, the same strength, the same elements which I am in the habit of attributing to the physical life around me in this wild and rugged desert.”

Madeline listened as one under a spell.  It was not only that this soft-voiced, eloquent priest knew how to move the heart, stir the soul; but his defense, his praise of Stewart, if they had been couched in the crude speech of cowboys, would have been a glory to her.

“Senora, I pray you, do not misunderstand my mission.  Beyond my confession to you I have only a duty to tell you of the man whose wife you are.  But I am a priest and I can read the soul.  The ways of God are inscrutable.  I am only a humble instrument.  You are a noble woman, and Senor Stewart is a man of desert iron forged anew in the crucible of love.  Quien sabe?  Senor Stewart swore he would kill me if I betrayed him.  But he will not lift his hand against me.  For the man bears you a very great and pure love, and it has changed him.  I no longer fear his threat, but I do fear his anger, should he ever know I spoke of his love, of his fool’s paradise.  I have watched his dark face turned to the sun setting over the desert.  I have watched him lift it to the light of the stars.  Think, my gracious and noble lady, think what is his paradise?  To love you above the spirit of the flesh; to know you are his wife, his, never to be another’s except by his sacrifice; to watch you with a secret glory of joy and pride; to stand, while he might, between you and evil; to find his happiness in service; to wait, with never a dream of telling you, for the hour to come when to leave you free he must go out and get himself shot!  Senora, that is beautiful, it is sublime, it is terrible.  It has brought me to you with my confession.  I repeat, Senora, the ways of God are inscrutable.  What is the meaning of