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 Carmen cried herself to sleep, resolving that she would hereafter cast aside her wicked uncle for this good-hearted Americano, yet never once connected her innocent penmanship with the deadly feud between them.  Women—­the best of them—­are strong as to collateral facts, swift of deduction, but vague as children are to the exact statement or recognition of premises.  It is hardly necessary to say that Carmen had never thought of connecting any act of hers with the claims of her uncle, and the circumstance of the signature she had totally forgotten.

The masculine reader will now understand Carmen’s confusion and blushes, and believe himself an ass to have thought them a confession of original affection.  The feminine reader will, by this time, become satisfied that the deceitful minx’s sole idea was to gain the affections of Thatcher.  And really I don’t know who is right.