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 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--”