There was something in her new supplicating grace, still retaining the faintest suggestion of her old girlish archness, that struck him. He took the letter and opened it. It was from Colonel Pendleton. Plainly, concisely, and formally, without giving the name of his authority or suggesting his interview with Mrs. Argalls, he had informed Yerba that he had documentary testimony that she was the daughter of the late Jose de Arguello, and legally entitled to bear his name. A copy of the instructions given to his wife, recognizing Yerba Buena, the ward of the San Francisco Trust, as his child and hers, and leaving to the mother the choice of making it known to her and others, was inclosed. Paul turned an unchanged face upon Yerba, who was watching him eagerly, uneasily, almost breathlessly. "And you think this concerns ME!" he said bitterly. "You think only of this, when I speak of the precious letter that bade me hope, and brought me to you?" "Paul," said the girl, with wondering eyes and hesitating lips; "do you mean to say that--that--this is--nothing to you?" "Yes--but forgive me, darling!" he broke out again, with a sudden vague remorsefulness, as he once more sought her elusive hand. "I am a brute--an egotist! I forgot that it might be something to YOU." "Paul," continued the girl, her voice quivering with a strange joy, "do you say that you--YOU yourself, care nothing for this?" "Nothing," he answered, gazing at her transfigured face with admiring wonder. "And"--more timidly, as a faint aurora kindled in her checks--"that you don't care--that--that--I am coming to you WITH A NAME, to give you in--exchange?" He started. "Yerba, you are not mocking me? You will be my wife?" She smiled, yet moving softly backwards with the grave stateliness of a vanishing yet beckoning goddess, until she reached the sumach-bush from which she had emerged. He followed. Another backward step, and it yielded to let her through; but even as it did so she caught him in her arms, and for a single moment it closed upon them both, and hid them in its glory. A still lingering song-bird, possibly convinced that he had mistaken the season, and that spring had really come, flew out with a little cry to carry the message south; but even then Paul and Yerba emerged with such innocent, childlike gravity, and, side by side, walked so composedly towards the house, that he thought better of it. CHAPTER IX.