in upon our fair name."

"Then, _tio mio_, let the Church at once dismiss me, as unworthy to be
her son!" pleaded Jose.

"What, excommunication?" cried the horrified uncle. "Never! Death
first! Are you still mad?"

Jose looked into the cold, emotionless eyes of the man and shuddered.
The ancient spirit of the Holy Inquisition lurked there, and he
cowered before it. But at least the semblance of freedom had been
offered him. His numbed heart already had taken hope. He were indeed
mad not to acquiesce in his uncle's demands, and accept the proffered
opportunity to leave forever the scenes of his suffering and disgrace.
And so he bowed again before the inexorable.

Arriving in Cartagena some months before this narrative opens, he had
gradually yielded himself to the restorative effects of changed
environment and the hope which his uncle's warm assurances aroused,
that a career would open to him in the New World, unclouded by the
climacteric episode of the publishing of his journal and his
subsequent arrogant bearing before the Holy Father, which had provoked
his fate. Under the beneficent influences of the soft climate and the
new interests of this tropic land he began to feel a budding of
something like confidence, and the suggestions of an unfamiliar
ambition to retrieve past failure and yet gratify, even if in small
measure, the parental hope which had first directed him as a child
into the fold of the Church. The Bishop had assigned him at once to
pedagogical work in the University; and in the teaching of history,
the languages, and, especially, his beloved Greek, Jose had found an
absorption that was slowly dimming the memory of the dark days which
he had left behind in the Old World.

But the University had not afforded him the only interest in his new
field. He had not been many weeks on Colombian soil when his awakening
perceptions sensed the people's oppression under the tyranny of
ecclesiastical politicians. Nor did he fail to scent the approach of a
tremendous conflict, in which the country would pass through violent
throes in the struggle to shake off the galling yoke of Rome.
Maintaining an attitude of strict neutrality, he had striven quietly
to gauge the anticlerical movement, and had been appalled to find it
so widespread and menacing. Only a miracle could save unhappy Colombia
from being rent by the fiercest of religious wars in the near future.
Oh, if he but had the will, as he had the intellectual