Senator bore the name of "Carmen
de Haro"; and modestly in the right hand corner, in almost microscopic
script, the further description of herself as "Artist." Perhaps the
picturesqueness of the name, and its historic suggestion caught the
scholar's taste, for when to his request, through his servant, that she
would be kind enough to state her business, she replied as frankly that
her business was personal to himself, he directed that she should be
admitted. Then entrenching himself behind his library table, overlooking
a bastion of books, and a glacis of pamphlets and papers, and throwing
into his forehead and eyes an expression of utter disqualification for
anything but the business before him, he calmly awaited the intruder.

She came, and for an instant stood, hesitatingly, framing herself as
a picture in the door. Mrs. Hopkinson was right,--she had "no style,"
unless an original and half-foreign quaintness could be called so. There
was a desperate attempt visible to combine an American shawl with the
habits of a mantilla, and it was always slipping from one shoulder,
that was so supple and vivacious as to betray the deficiencies of an
education in stays. There was a cluster of black curls around her
low forehead, fitting her so closely as to seem to be a part of the
seal-skin cap she wore.

Once, from the force of habit, she attempted to put her shawl over
her head and talk through the folds gathered under her chin, but an
astonished look from the Senator checked her. Nevertheless, he felt
relieved, and rising, motioned her to a chair with a heartiness he would
have scarcely shown to a Parisian toilleta. And when, with two or three
quick, long steps, she reached his side, and showed, a frank, innocent,
but strong and determined little face, feminine only in its flash of eye
and beauty of lip and chin curves, he put down the pamphlet he had taken
up somewhat ostentatiously, and gently begged to know her business.

I think I have once before spoken of her voice,--an organ more often
cultivated by my fair country-women for singing than for speaking,
which, considering that much of our practical relations with the sex are
carried on without the aid of an opera score, seems a mistaken notion of
theirs,--and of its sweetness, gentle inflexion, and musical emphasis.
She had the advantage of having been trained in a musical language, and
came of a race with whom catarrhs and sore throats were rare. So that
in a few brief