mine was his only mistress, claiming his entire time,
exasperating him with fickleness, but still requiring that supreme
devotion of which his nature was capable. It is possible that Miss
Carmen saw this too, and so set about with feminine tact, if not to
supplement, at least to make her rival less pertinacious and absorbing.
Apart from this object, she zealously labored in her profession, yet
with small pecuniary result, I fear. Local art was at a discount in
California. The scenery of the country had not yet become famous; rather
it was reserved for a certain Eastern artist, already famous, to make
it so; and people cared little for the reproduction, under their very
noses, of that which they saw continually with their own eyes, and
valued not. So that little Mistress Carmen was fain to divert her
artist soul to support her plump little material body; and made
divers excursions into the regions of ceramic art, painting on velvet,
illuminating missals, decorating china, and the like. I have in my
possession some wax flowers--a startling fuchsia and a bewildering
dahlia--sold for a mere pittance by this little lady, whose pictures
lately took the prize at a foreign exhibition, shortly after she had
been half starved by a California public, and claimed by a California
press as its fostered child of genius.

Of these struggles and triumphs Thatcher had no knowledge; yet he was
perhaps more startled than he would own to himself when, one December
day, he received this despatch: "Come to Washington at once.--Carmen de
Haro."

"Carmen de Haro!" I grieve to state that such was the preoccupation of
this man, elected by fate to be the hero of the solitary amatory episode
of his story, that for a moment he could not recall her. When the honest
little figure that had so manfully stood up against him, and had proved
her sex by afterwards running away from him, came back at last to his
memory, he was at first mystified and then self-reproachful. He had
been, he felt vaguely, untrue to himself. He had been remiss to the
self-confessed daughter of his enemy. Yet why should she telegraph to
him, and what was she doing in Washington? To all these speculations
it is to be said to his credit that he looked for no sentimental
or romantic answer. Royal Thatcher was naturally modest and
self-depreciating in his relations to the other sex, as indeed most men
who are apt to be successful with women generally are, despite a vast
degree of su