Thatcher's landlady was one of the former class. She had unfortunately
survived not only her husband but his property, and, living in some
deserted chamber, had, after the fashion of the Italian nobility, let
out the rest of the ruin. A tendency to dwell upon these facts gave
her conversation a peculiar significance on the first of each month.
Thatcher had noticed this with the sensitiveness of an impoverished
gentleman. But when, a few days after her lodger's sudden disappearance,
a note came from him containing a draft in noble excess of all arrears
and charges, the widow's heart was lifted, and the rock smitten with the
golden wand gushed beneficence that shone in a new gown for the widow
and a new suit for "Johnny," her son, a new oil cloth in the hall,
better service to the lodgers, and, let us be thankful, a kindlier
consideration for the poor little black-eyed painter from Monterey, then
dreadfully behind in her room rent. For, to tell the truth, the calls
upon Miss De Haro's scant purse by her uncle had lately been frequent,
perjury having declined in the Monterey market, through excessive
and injudicious supply, until the line of demarcation between it and
absolute verity was so finely drawn that Victor Garcia had remarked that
"he might as well tell the truth at once and save his soul, since the
devil was in the market."

Mistress Plodgitt, the landlady, could not resist the desire to acquaint
Carmen De Haro with her good fortune. "He was always a friend of yours,
my dear,--and I know him to be a gentleman that would never let a
poor widow suffer; and see what he says about you!" Here she produced
Thatcher's note and read: "Tell my little neighbor that I shall come
back soon to carry her and her sketching tools off by force, and I shall
not let her return until she has caught the black mountains and the
red rocks she used to talk about, and put the 'Blue Mass' mill in the
foreground of the picture I shall order."