money than to expend it on the Baron's mortgages.
But"--he stopped, and his simple, honest face assumed an air of
profound and sagacious cunning--"I am glad to talk about it with you,
who of course are perfectly familiar with the affair. I shall now be
able to know what to say. My word, my friend, has some weight here,
and I shall use it. And now you shall tell me WHO is our lovely
friend, and WHO were her parents and her kindred in her own home. Her
associates here, you possibly know, are an impossible colonel and his
never-before-approached valet, with some South American Indian
planters, and, I believe, a pork-butcher's daughter. But of THEM--it
makes nothing. Tell me of HER people."

With his kindly serious face within a few inches of Paul's, and
sympathizing curiosity beaming from his pince-nez, he obliged the
wretched and conscience-stricken Hathaway to respond with a detailed
account of Yerba's parentage as projected by herself and indorsed by
Colonel Pendleton. He dwelt somewhat particularly on the romantic
character of the Trust, hoping to draw the General's attention away
from the question of relationship, but he was chagrined to find that
the honest warrior evidently confounded the Trust with some
eleemosynary institution and sympathetically glossed it over. "Of
course," he said, "the Mexican Minister at Berlin would know all about
the Arguello family: so there would be no question there."

Paul was not sorry when the time came to take leave of his friend; but
once again in the clear moonlight and fresh, balmy air of the Allee, he
forgot the unpleasantness of the interview. He found himself thinking
only of his ride with Yerba. Well! he had told her that he loved her.
She knew it now, and although she had forbidden him to speak further,
she had not wholly rejected it. It must be her morbid consciousness of
the mystery of her birth that withheld a return of her
affections,--some half-knowledge, perhaps, that she would not divulge,
yet that kept her unduly sensitive of accepting his love. He was
satisfied there was no entanglement; her heart was virgin. He even
dared to hope that she had ALWAYS cared for him. It was for HIM to
remove all obstacles--to prevail upon her to leave this place and
return to America with him as her husband, the guardian of her good
name, and the custodian of her secret. At times the strains of a
dreamy German waltz, played in the distance, brought back to him the
brie