on that rock with the inscription, 'Road to the Blue Mass Company's new
mills to the right,' and combine business with art? That's the fault of
you geniuses. But what's this blanketed figure doing here, lying before
the furnace? You never saw one of my miners there,--and a Mexican, too,
by his serape." "That," quoth Mistress Carmen, coolly, "was put in
to fill up the foreground,--I wanted something there to balance
the picture." "But," continued Thatcher, dropping into unconscious
admiration again, "it's drawn to the life. Tell me, Miss De Haro, before
I ask the aid and counsel of Mrs. Plodgitt, who is my hated rival, and
your lay figure and model?" "Oh," said Carmen, with a little sigh, "It's
only poor Coucho." "And where is Concho?" (a little impatiently.) "He's
dead, Don Royal." "Dead?" "Of a verity,--very dead,--murdered by your
countrymen." "I see,--and you know him?" "He was my friend."
"Oh!"
"Truly."
"But" (wickedly), "isn't this a rather ghastly advertisement--outside of
an illustrated newspaper--of my property?"
"Ghastly, Don Royal. Look you, he sleeps."
"Ay" (in Spanish), "as the dead."
Carmen (crossing herself hastily), "After the fashion of the dead."
They were both feeling uncomfortable. Carmen was shivering. But, being
a woman, and tactful, she recovered her head first. "It is a study for
myself, Don Royal; I shall make you another."
And she slipped away, as she thought, out of the subject and his
presence.
But she was mistaken; in the evening he renewed the conversation. Carmen
began to fence, not from cowardice or deceit, as the masculine reader
would readily infer, but from some wonderful feminine instinct that told
her to be cautious. But he got from her the fact, to him before unknown,
that she was the niece of his main antagonist, and, being a gentleman,
so redoubled his attentions and his courtesy that Mrs. Plodgitt made up
her mind that it was a foregone conclusion, and seriously reflected as
to what she should wear on the momentous occasion. But that night poor
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