her but one song, the flowers or trees spake but one language, and her skies never brightened except in color.  She came out strong on the Catholic saints, and would toss you up a cleanly-shaven Aloysius, sweetly destitute of expression, or a dropsical, lethargic Madonna that you couldn’t have told from an old master, so bad it was.  Her faculty of faithful reproduction even showed itself in fanciful lettering,—­and latterly in the imitation of fabrics and signatures.  Indeed, with her eye for beauty of form, she had always excelled in penmanship at the Convent,—­an accomplishment which the good sisters held in great repute.

In person she was petite, with a still unformed girlish figure, perhaps a little too flat across the back, and with possibly a too great tendency to a boyish stride in walking.  Her brow, covered by blue-black hair, was low and frank and honest; her eyes, a very dark hazel, were not particularly large, but rather heavily freighted in their melancholy lids with sleeping passion; her nose was of that unimportant character which no man remembers; her mouth was small and straight; her teeth, white and regular.  The whole expression of her face was piquancy that might be subdued by tenderness or made malevolent by anger.  At present it was a salad in which the oil and vinegar were deftly combined.  The astute feminine reader will of course understand that this is the ordinary superficial masculine criticism, and at once make up her mind both as to the character of the young lady and the competency of the critic.  I only know that I rather liked her.  And her functions are somewhat important in this veracious history.

She looked up, started to her feet, leveled her black brows at the intruder, but, at a sign from her uncle, showed her white teeth and spake.

It was only a sentence, and a rather common-place one at that; but if she could have put her voice upon her canvas, she might have retrieved the Garcia fortunes.  For it was so musical, so tender, so sympathizing, so melodious, so replete with the graciousness of womanhood, that she seemed to have invented the language.  And yet that sentence was only an exaggerated form of the ‘How d’ye do,’ whined out, doled out, lisped out, or shot out from the pretty mouths of my fair countrywomen.

Miguel admired the paintings.  He was struck particularly with a crayon drawing of a mule.  “Mother of God, it is the mule itself! observe how it will not go.”  Then the crafty Victor broke in with, “But it is nothing to her writing; look, you shall tell to me which is the handwriting of Pio Pico;” and, from a drawer in the secretary, he drew forth two signatures.  One was affixed to a yellowish paper, the other drawn on plain white foolscap.  Of course Miguel took the more modern one with lover-like gallantry.  “It is this is genuine!” Victor laughed triumphantly; Carmen echoed the laugh melodiously in child-like glee, and added, with a slight toss of her piquant head, “It is mine!” The best of the sex will not refuse a just and overdue compliment from even the man they dislike.  It’s the principle they’re after, not the sentiment.