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?"

The Senator said hastily that he feared--he in fact was convinced--that
his duty during this session was required more at his desk, in the
committee work, than in speaking, &c., &c.

"Ah," said Carmen sadly, "it is true, then, all this that I have heard.
It is true that what they have told me,--that you have given up the
great party,--that your voice is not longer heard in the old--what you
call this--eh--the old ISSUES?"

"If any one has told you that, Miss De Haro," responded the Senator
sharply, "he has spoken foolishly. You have been misinformed. May I ask
who--"

"Ah!" said Carmen, "I know not! It is in the air! I am a stranger.
Perhaps I am deceived. But it is of all. I say to them, When shall I
hear him speak? I go day after day to the Capitol, I watch him,--the
great Emancipator,--but it is of business, eh?--it is the claim of that
one, it is the tax, eh? it is the impost, it is the post-office, but it
is the great speech of human rights--never, NEVER. I say, 'How arrives
all this?' And some say, and shake their heads, 'never again he speaks.'
He is what you call 'played--yes, it is so, eh?--played out.' I know it
not,--it is a word from Bos-ton, perhaps? They say he has--eh, I speak
not the English well--the party he has shaken, 'shook,'--yes,--he has
the party 'shaken,' eh? It is right,--it is the language of Bos-ton,
eh?"

"Permit me to say, Miss De Haro," returned the Senator, rising with some
asperity, "that you seem to have been unfortunate in your selection of
acquaintances, and still more so in your ideas of the derivations of the
English tongue. The--er--the--er--expressions you have quoted are not
common to Boston, but emanate, I believe, from the West."

Carmen de Haro contritely buried everything but her black eyes in her
shawl.

"No one," he continued, more gently, sitting down again, "has the right
to forecast from my past what I intend to do in the future, or designate
the means I may choose to serve the principles I hold or the party