opened his door during that period, and fearing sickness, sudden death,
or perhaps suicide, by her appeals to the landlady, assisted unwittingly
in discovering his flight and defection. As she was for a few moments
as indignant as Mrs. Plodgitt, it is evident that she had but little
sympathy with the delinquent. And besides, hitherto she had known only
Concho, her earliest friend, and was true to his memory, as against all
Americanos, whom she firmly believed to be his murderers.
So she dismissed the offer and the man from her mind, and went back
to her painting,--a fancy portrait of the good Padre Junipero Serra,
a great missionary, who, haply for the integrity of his bones and
character, died some hundred years before the Americans took possession
of California. The picture was fair but unsaleable, and she began to
think seriously of sign painting, which was then much more popular and
marketable. An unfinished head of San Juan de Bautista, artificially
framed in clouds, she disposed of to a prominent druggist for $50, where
it did good service as exhibiting the effect of four bottles of "Jones's
Freckle Eradicator," and in a pleasant and unobtrusive way revived the
memory of the saint. Still, she felt weary and was growing despondent,
and had a longing for the good Sisters and the blameless lethargy of
conventual life, and then--
He came!
But not as the Prince should come, on a white charger, to carry away
this cruelly-abused and enchanted damsel. He was sunburned, he was
bearded like "the pard"; he was a little careless as to his dress, and
pre-occupied in his ways. But his mouth and eyes were the same; and when
he repeated in his old frank, half-mischievous way the invitation of his
letter, poor little Carmen could only hesitate and blush.
A thought struck him and sent the color to his face. Your gentleman
born is always as modest as a woman. He ran down stairs, and seizing the
widowed Plodgitt, said hastily:
"You're just killing yourself here. Take a change. Come down to Monterey
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