f the most simple girlish creatures that God ever sent upon earth. A
woman that I should be proud to claim as my daughter, a woman that
would always be the superior of any man who dare aspire to be her
husband! A young lady as peerless in her beauty as she is in her
accomplishments, and whose equal don't walk this planet! I know, sir,
YOU don't follow me; I know, Mr. Hathaway, your Puritan prejudices;
your Church proclivities, your worldly sense of propriety; and, above
all, sir, the blanked hypocritical Pharisaic doctrines of your party--I
mean no offense to YOU, sir, personally--blind you to that girl's
perfections. She, poor child, herself has seen it and felt it, but
never, in her blameless innocence and purity, suspecting the cause,
'There is,' she said to me last night, confidentially, 'something
strangely antagonistic and repellent in our natures, some undefined and
nameless barrier between our ever understanding each other.' You
comprehend, Mr. Hathaway, she does full justice to your intentions and
your unquestioned abilities. 'I am not blind,' she said, 'to Mr.
Hathaway's gifts, and it is very possible the fault lies with me.' Her
very words, sir."

"Then you believe she is perfectly ignorant of her real mother?" asked
Paul, with a steady voice, but a whitening face.

"As an unborn child," said the colonel, emphatically. "The snow on the
Sierras is not more spotlessly pure of any trace or contamination of
the mud of the mining ditches, than she of her mother and her past.
The knowledge of it, the mere breath of suspicion of it, in her
presence would be a profanation, sir! Look at her eye--open as the sky
and as clear; look at her face and figure--as clean, sir, as a
Blue-Grass thoroughbred! Look at the way she carries herself, whether
in those white frillings of her simple school-gown, or that black
evening dress that makes her look like a princess! And, blank me, if
she isn't one! There's no poor stock there--no white trash--no mixed
blood, sir. Blank it all, sir, if it comes to THAT--the Arguellos--if
there's a hound of them living--might go down on their knees to have
their name borne by such a creature! By the Eternal, sir, if one of
them dared to cross her path with a word that wasn't abject--yes, sir,
ABJECT, I'd wipe his dust off the earth and send it back to his
ancestors before he knew where he was, or my name isn't Harry
Pendleton!"

Hopeless and inconsistent as all this was, it was a