had time to change her underskirt, for there was the
dust of the stage on its delicate lace edging, as she threw herself into
an armchair and crossed her pretty slippered feet before her. Her face
was pale, its pallor incautiously increased by powder; and as Clarence
looked at its still youthful, charming outline, he was not perhaps
sorry that the exquisite pink and white skin beneath, which he had once
kissed, was hidden from that awakened recollection. Yet there was little
trace of the girlish Susy in the pretty, but prematurely jaded, actress
before him, and he felt momentarily relieved. It was her youth and
freshness appealing to his own youth and imagination that he had
loved--not HER. Yet as she greeted him with a slight exaggeration of
glance, voice, and manner, he remembered that even as a girl she was an
actress.

Nothing of this, however, was in his voice and manner as he gently
thanked her for the opportunity of meeting her again. And he was frank,
for the diversion he had expected he had found; he even was conscious of
thinking more kindly of his wife who had supplanted her.

"I told Jim he must fetch you if he had to carry you," she said,
striking the palm of her hand with her fan, and glancing at her husband.
"I reckon he guessed WHY, though I didn't tell him--I don't tell Jim
EVERYTHING."

Here Jim rose, and looking at his watch, "guessed he'd run over to the
Lick House and get some cigars." If he was acting upon some hint from
his wife, his simulation was so badly done that Clarence felt his
first sense of uneasiness. But as Hooker closed the door awkwardly and
unostentatiously behind him, Clarence smilingly said he had waited to
hear the message from her own lips.

"Jim only knows what he's heard outside: the talk of men, you know,--and
he hears a good deal of that--more, perhaps, than YOU do. It was that
which put me up to finding out the truth. And I didn't rest till I did.
I'm not to be fooled, Clarence,--you don't mind my calling you Clarence
now we're both married and done for,--and I'm not the kind to be fooled
by anybody from the Cow counties--and that's the Robles Ranche. I'm a
Southern woman myself from Missouri, but I'm for the Union first, last,
and all the time, and I call myself a match for any lazy, dawdling,
lash-swinging slaveholder and slaveholderess--whether they're mixed
blood, Heaven only knows, or what--or their friends or relations, or
the dirty half-Spanish grandees and their