prig too--dear boy. And Mrs. Peyton
was--bless my soul!--a Benham and a planter's daughter, and I--I was
only a picked-up orphan! That's where Jim is better than you--now sit
still, goosey!--even if I don't like him as much. Oh, I know what you're
always thinking, you're thinking we're both exaggerated and theatrical,
ain't you? But don't you think it's a heap better to be exaggerated and
theatrical about things that are just sentimental and romantic than to
be so awfully possessed and overcome about things that are only real?
There, you needn't stare at me so! It's true. You've had your fill of
grandeur and propriety, and--here you are. And," she added with a little
chuckle, as she tucked up her feet and leaned a little closer to him,
"here's ME."

He did not speak, but his arm quite unconsciously passed round her small
waist.

"You see, Clarence," she went on with equal unconsciousness of the act,
"you ought never to have let me go--never! You ought to have kept me
here--or run away with me. And you oughtn't to have tried to make me
proper. And you oughtn't to have driven me to flirt with that horrid
Spaniard, and you oughtn't to have been so horribly cold and severe when
I did. And you oughtn't to have made me take up with Jim, who was the
only one who thought me his equal. I might have been very silly and
capricious; I might have been very vain, but my vanity isn't a bit worse
than your pride; my love of praise and applause in the theatre isn't a
bit more horrid than your fears of what people might think of you or me.
That's gospel truth, isn't it, Clarence? Tell me! Don't look that way
and this--look at ME! I ain't poisonous, Clarence. Why, one of your
cheeks is redder than the other, Clarence; that's the one that's turned
from me. Come," she went on, taking the lapels of his coat between her
hands and half shaking him, half drawing him nearer her bright face.
"Tell me--isn't it true?"

"I was thinking of you just now when I fell asleep, Susy," he said. He
did not know why he said it; he had not intended to tell her, he had
only meant to avoid a direct answer to her question; yet even now he
went on. "And I thought of you when I was out there in the rose garden
waiting to come in here."

"You did?" she said, drawing in her breath. A wave of delicate pink
color came up to her very eyes, it seemed to him as quickly and as
innocently as when she was a girl. "And what DID you think, Klarns," she
half whispered--"t