y to entrap love and a fortune.
It must be understood that the two muleteers persisted in their story
concerning Apaches, and that consequently Clara has come to think of
Thurstane as dead. Meantime Coronado, after the first two days of wild
excitement, has conducted himself with rare intelligence, never alarming
her with talk of love, always courteous, kind, and useful. Little by
little he has worn away her suspicions that he planned murder, and her
only remaining anger against him is because he did not attempt to search
for Thurstane; but even for that she is obliged to see some excuse in the
terrible word "Apaches."

"I have had no thought but for _her_ safety," Coronado often said to Mrs.
Stanley, who as often repeated the words to Clara. "I have made mistakes,"
he would go on. "The San Juan journey was one. I will not even plead
Garcia's instructions to excuse it. But our circumstances have been
terrible. Who could always take the right step amid such trials? All I ask
is charity. If humility deserves mercy, I deserve it."

Coronado even schooled himself into expressing sympathy with Clara for the
loss of Thurstane. He spoke of him as her affianced, eulogized his
character, admitted that he had not formerly done him justice, hinting
that this blindness had sprung from jealousy, and so alluded to his own
affection. These things he said at first to Aunt Maria, and she, his
steady partisan, repeated them to Clara, until at last the girl could bear
to hear them from Coronado. Sympathy! the bleeding heart must have it; it
will accept this balm from almost any hand, and it will pay for it in
gratitude and trust.

Thus in two months from the disappearance of Thurstane his rival had begun
to hope that he was supplanting him. Of course he had given up all thought
of carrying out the horrible plan with which he had started from Santa Fe.
Indeed, he began to have a horror of Garcia, as a man who had set him on a
wrong track and nearly brought him into folly and ruin. One might say that
Satan was in a state of mind to rebuke sin.

Let us now glance at Clara. She is seated beside Aunt Maria on the
quarter-deck of the schooner. Her troubles have changed her; only eighteen
years old, she has the air of twenty-four; her once rounded face is thin,
and her childlike sweetness has become tender gravity. When she entered on
this journey she resembled the girl faces of Greuze; now she is sometimes
a _mater amabilis_, and sometimes a