“That seems enough,” continued Clara, when she could speak again.  “I suppose that what Garcia and the lawyers tell us is true.  I suppose I am not worth a thousand dollars.”

“Will a thousand dollars support you here?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t think it will.”

“Then if I can’t set this thing straight, if I can’t make somebody disgorge your property, I must take you back with me.”

“Oh! if you would!” implored Clara, all the tender helplessness of Spanish girlhood appealing from her eyes.

“Of course I will,” said Aunt Maria, with a benevolent energy which was almost terrific.

“I would try to do something.  I don’t know.  Couldn’t I teach Spanish?”

“You shan’t” decided Aunt Maria.  “Yes, you shall.  You shall be professor of foreign languages in a Female College which I mean to have founded.”

Clara stared with astonishment, and then burst into a hearty fit of laughter, the two finishing the drying of her tears.  She was so far from wishing to be a strong-minded person of either gender, that she did not comprehend that her aunt could wish it for her, or could herself seriously claim to be one.  The talk about a professorship was in her estimation the wayward, humorous whim of an eccentric who was fond of solemn joking.  Mrs. Stanley, meanwhile, could not see why her utterance should not be taken in earnest, and opened her eyes at Clara’s merriment.

We must say a word or two concerning the past of this young lady.  Twenty-five years previous a New Yorker named Augustus Van Diemen, the brother of that Maria Jane Van Diemen now known to the world as Mrs. Stanley, had migrated to California, set up in the hide business, and married by stealth the daughter of a wealthy Mexican named Pedro Munoz.  Munoz got into a Spanish Catholic rage at having a Yankee Protestant son-in-law, disowned and formally disinherited his child, and worried her husband into quitting the country.  Van Diemen returned to the United States, but his wife soon became homesick for her native land, and, like a good husband as he was, he went once more to Mexico.  This time he settled in Santa Fe, where he accumulated a handsome fortune, lived in the best house in the city, and owned haciendas.

Clara’s mother dying when the girl was fourteen years old, Van Diemen felt free to give her, his only child, an American education, and sent her to New York, where she went through four years of schooling.  During this period came the war between the United States and Mexico.  Foreign residents were ill-treated; Van Diemen was sometimes a prisoner, sometimes a fugitive; in one way or another his fortune went to pieces.  Four months previous to the opening of this story he died in a state little better than insolvency.  Clara, returning to Santa Fe under the care of her energetic and affectionate relative, found that the deluge of debt would cover town house and haciendas, leaving her barely a thousand dollars.  She was handsome and accomplished, but she was an orphan and poor.  The main chance with her seemed to lie in the likelihood that she would find a mother (or a father) in Aunt Maria.