Yes, there was another sustaining possibility, and of a more poetic nature.  There was a young American officer named Thurstane, a second lieutenant acting as quartermaster of the department, who had met her heretofore in New York, who had seemed delighted to welcome her to Santa Fe, and who now called on her nearly every day.  Might it not be that Lieutenant Thurstane would want to make her Mrs. Thurstane, and would have power granted him to induce her to consent to the arrangement?  Clara was sufficiently a woman, and sufficiently a Spanish woman especially, to believe in marriage.  She did not mean particularly to be Mrs. Thurstane, but she did mean generally to be Mrs. Somebody.  And why not Thurstane?  Well, that was for him to decide, at least to a considerable extent.  In the mean time she did not love him; she only disliked the thought of leaving him.

While these two women had been talking and thinking, a lazy Indian servant had been lounging up the stairway.  Arrived on the roof, he advanced to La Senorita Clara, and handed her a letter.  The girl opened it, glanced through it with a flushing face, and cried out delightedly, “It is from my grandfather.  How wonderful!  O holy Maria, thanks!  His heart has been softened.  He invites me to come and live with him in San Francisco. O Madre de Dios!”

Although Clara spoke English perfectly, and although she was in faith quite as much of a Protestant as a Catholic, yet in her moments of strong excitement she sometimes fell back into the language and ideas of her childhood.

“Child, what are you jabbering about?” asked Aunt Maria.

“There it is.  See!  Pedro Munoz!  It is his own signature.  I have seen letters of his.  Pedro Munoz!  Read it.  Oh! you don’t read Spanish.”

Then she translated the letter aloud.  Aunt Maria listened with a firm and almost stern aspect, like one who sees some justice done, but not enough.

“He doesn’t beg your pardon,” she said at the close of the reading.

Clara, supposing that she was expected to laugh, and not seeing the point of the joke, stared in amazement.

“But probably he is in a meeker mood now,” continued Aunt Maria.  “By this time it is to be hoped that he sees his past conduct in a proper light.  The letter was written three months ago.”

“Three months ago,” repeated Clara.  “Yes, it has taken all that time to come.  How long will it take me to go there?  How shall I go?”

“We will see,” said Aunt Maria, with the air of one who holds the fates in her hand, and doesn’t mean to open it till she gets ready.  She was by no means satisfied as yet that this grandfather Munoz was a proper person to be intrusted with the destinies of a young lady.  In refusing to let his daughter select her own husband, he had shown a very squinting and incomplete perception of the rights of woman.

“Old reprobate!” thought Aunt Maria.  “Probably he has got gouty with his vices, and wants to be nursed.  I fancy I see him getting Clara without going on his sore marrow-bones and begging pardon of gods and women.”