since the father carried his point it is immaterial what precise
methods he used. Men are not fools even in a contest with women. They
usually get their own way, if they take the trouble to go wisely and
kindly about it. Two years afterwards, Antonia followed her brother to
New York, and this time, the mother made less opposition. Perhaps she
divined that opposition would have been still more useless than in the
case of the boy. For Robert Worth had one invincible determination; it
was, that this beautiful child, who so much resembled a mother whom
he idolized, should be, during the most susceptible years of her life,
under that mother's influence.

And he was well repaid for the self-denial her absence entailed,
when Antonia came back to him, alert, self-reliant, industrious, an
intelligent and responsive companion, a neat and capable housekeeper,
who insensibly gave to his home that American air it lacked, and who set
upon his table the well-cooked meats and delicate dishes which he had
often longed for.

John, the youngest boy, was still in New York finishing his course of
study; but regarding Isabel, there seemed to be a tacit relinquishment
of the purpose, so inflexibly carried out with her brothers and sister.
Isabel was entirely different from them. Her father had watched her
carefully, and come to the conviction that it would be impossible to
make her nature take the American mintage. She was as distinctly Iberian
as Antonia was Anglo-American.

In her brothers the admixture of races had been only as alloy to metal.
Thomas Worth was but a darker copy of his father. John had the romance
and sensitive honor of old Spain, mingled with the love of liberty, and
the practical temper, of those Worths who had defied both Charles the
First and George the Third. But Isabel had no soul-kinship with her
father's people. Robert Worth had seen in the Yturbide residencia
in Mexico the family portraits which they had brought with them from
Castile. Isabel was the Yturbide of her day. She had all their physical
traits, and from her large golden-black eyes the same passionate soul
looked forth. He felt that it would be utter cruelty to send her among
people who must always be strangers to her.

So Isabel dreamed away her childhood at her mother's side, or with
the sisters in the convent, learning from them such simple and useless
matters as they considered necessary for a damosel of family and
fortune. On the night of the Se