with Las Casas."

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