should curse my life? I only want
peace--just a little peace. I am content to live and die just as I am.
I desire nothing more than to be left--alone."

"Who told you--all this?" The Padre's voice had no sympathy.

"My aunt. Aunt Mercy."

"You were--happy before she told you?"

"Yes."

"Why did she tell you?"

"I don't know. At least--yes, she told me so as to warn me. So that I
might avoid bringing disaster upon those whom I had no desire to
hurt."

The Padre rose from his seat and crossed to where the girl was
sitting. He stood for a moment just behind her chair. Then, very
gently, he laid one sunburnt hand upon her shoulder.

"Little girl," he said, with a wonderful kindliness that started the
long-threatened tears to the girl's eyes, "you've got a peck of
trouble inside that golden head of yours. But it's all in there.
There's none of it outside. Look back over all those things you've
told me. Every one of them. Just show me where your hand in them lies.
There is not a disaster that you have mentioned but what possesses its
perfectly logical, natural cause. There is not one that has not been
duplicated, triplicated, ah! dozens and dozens of times since this
quaint old world of ours began. You believe it is due to your
influence because a silly old woman catches you in an overwrought
moment and tells you so. She has implanted a parasite in your little
head that has stuck there and grown out of all proportion. Believe me,
child, you cannot influence the destinies of men. You have no say in
the matter. As we are made, so we must work out our own salvation. It
has been your lot to witness many disasters, but had these things
occurred with other girls as the central figure, would you have
attributed this hideous curse to their lives? Would you? Never. But
you readily attribute it to your own. I am an old man my dear; older
to-day, perhaps, by far than my years call for. I have seen so much of
misery and trouble that sometimes I have thought that all life is just
one long sea of disaster. But it isn't--unless we choose to make it
so. You are rapidly making yours such. You are naturally generous, and
kind, and sympathetic. These things you have allowed to develop in you
until they have become something approaching disease. Vampires sucking
out all your nervous strength. Abandon these things for a while. Live
the life the good God gave you. Enjoy your living moments as you were
intended to enjoy them. And be than