Carmen nodded her head quickly, “Yes; my great-great-great-g-r-e-a-t grandfather!”

The Senator stared.

“Oh, yes.  I am the niece of Victor Castro, who married my father’s sister.”

“The Victor Castro of the ‘Blue Mass’ mine?” asked the Senator abruptly.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

Had the Senator been of the Gashwiler type, he would have expressed himself, after the average masculine fashion, by a long-drawn whistle.  But his only perceptible appreciation of a sudden astonishment and suspicion in his mind was a lowering of the social thermometer of the room so decided that poor Carmen looked up innocently, chilled, and drew her shawl closer around her shoulders.

“I have something more to ask,” said Carmen, hanging her head,—­“it is a great, oh, a very great favor.”

The Senator had retreated behind his bastion of books again, and was visibly preparing for an assault.  He saw it all now.  He had been, in some vague way, deluded.  He had given confidential audience to the niece of one of the Great Claimants before Congress.  The inevitable axe had come to the grindstone.  What might not this woman dare ask of him?  He was the more implacable that he felt he had already been prepossessed—­and honestly prepossessed—­in her favor.  He was angry with her for having pleased him.  Under the icy polish of his manner there were certain Puritan callosities caused by early straight-lacing.  He was not yet quite free from his ancestor’s cheerful ethics that Nature, as represented by an Impulse, was as much to be restrained as Order represented by a Quaker.

Without apparently noticing his manner, Carmen went on, with a certain potential freedom of style, gesture, and manner scarcely to be indicated in her mere words.  “You know, then, I am of Spanish blood, and that, what was my adopted country, our motto was, ‘God and Liberty.’  It was of you, sir,—­the great Emancipator,—­the apostle of that Liberty,—­the friend of the down-trodden and oppressed,—­that I, as a child, first knew.  In the histories of this great country I have read of you, I have learned your orations.  I have longed to hear you in your own pulpit deliver the creed of my ancestors.  To hear you, of yourself, speak, ah!  Madre de Dios! what shall I say,—­speak the oration eloquent,—­to make the—­what you call—­the debate, that is what I have for so long hoped.  Eh!  Pardon,—­you are thinking me foolish,—­wild, eh?—­a small child,—­eh?”

Becoming more and more dialectical as she went on, she said suddenly, “I have you of myself offended.  You are mad of me as a bold, bad child?  It is so?”

The Senator, as visibly becoming limp and weak again behind his entrenchments, managed to say, “Oh, no!” then, “really!” and finally, “Tha-a-nks!”

“I am here but for a day.  I return to California in a day, as it were to-morrow.  I shall never, never hear you speak in your place in the Capitol of this great country?”