“Your position?”
“Yes. How much what papa said to you might alter things. But I cannot see how I can say anything to you, except to be patient. Yes, let us both be patient.”
“Patience and despair do not travel together.”
“Discard despair, and trust to patience, and”—she was going to say, “trust me,” but remembered her mother's commands, and that to say so much even would be to encourage him. She was silent. She could have rejected an offer of marriage easily without taking away all hope, but as she “must not encourage him,” that was the most difficult dilemma for the poor girl. “Trust to papa, and—and do not be blaming me in your heart. I cannot bear that.”
“I shall not blame you. I shall do whatever you order me. But at all times I do not understand you,” said he, sadly.
“It is because my position is so—so difficult, so unnatural. I wish you could understand it without my explaining it. Can't you?”
“I'll try,” said he, in most dejected tones, again thinking of the elegant New Yorkers, and fascinating Washingtonians, on their knees before her. “But I do not understand why you refuse me one word of encouragement.”
“Oh! that is just the word I cannot give,” she sighed.
“This is all the work of Doña Josefa,” thought he, and the form of the handsome matron seemed to rise before him from the billows of the Pacific, and stand with Juno's lofty majesty in severe impassibility before his sad gaze.
Mercedes, too, was looking at the immense sea, as if trying to discover in that vast expanse some consoling words that a good, obedient daughter might speak on such an occasion.