, yet self-possessed. "But I suppose you
came here only to see Mary and mother. I'm sure you let them know that
plainly enough last evening."

"But you said"--began the stupefied Clarence.

"Never mind what I said. It's always what I say, never what YOU say; and
you don't say anything."

The woodland influence must have been still very strong upon Clarence
that he did not discover in all this that, while Susy's general
capriciousness was unchanged, there was a new and singular insincerity
in her manifest acting. She was either concealing the existence of some
other real emotion, or assuming one that was absent. But he did not
notice it, and only replied tenderly:--

"But I want to say a great deal to you, Susy. I want to say that if you
still feel as I do, and as I have always felt, and you think you could
be happy as I would be if--if--we could be always together, we need not
conceal it from your mother and father any longer. I am old enough to
speak for myself, and I am my own master. Your mother has been very kind
to me,--so kind that it doesn't seem quite right to deceive her,--and
when I tell her that I love you, and that I want you to be my wife, I
believe she will give us her blessing."

Susy uttered a strange little laugh, and with an assumption of coyness,
that was, however, still affected, stooped to pick a few berries from a
manzanita bush.

"I'll tell you what she'll say, Clarence. She'll say you're frightfully
young, and so you are!"

The young fellow tried to echo the laugh, but felt as if he had received
a blow. For the first time he was conscious of the truth: this girl,
whom he had fondly regarded as a child, had already passed him in the
race; she had become a woman before he was yet a man, and now stood
before him, maturer in her knowledge, and older in her understanding, of
herself and of him. This was the change that had perplexed him; this
was the presence that had come between them,--a Susy he had never known
before.

She laughed at his changed expression, and then swung herself easily to
a sitting posture on the low projecting branch of a hemlock. The act
was still girlish, but, nevertheless, she looked down upon him in
a superior, patronizing way. "Now, Clarence," she said, with a
half-abstracted manner, "don't you be a big fool! If you talk that way
to mother, she'll only tell you to wait two or three years until you
know your own mind, and she'll pack me off to that horrid school aga