in,
besides watching me like a cat every moment you are here. If you want
to stay here, and see me sometimes like this, you'll just behave as you
have done, and say nothing. Do you see? Perhaps you don't care to come,
or are satisfied with Mary and mother. Say so, then. Goodness knows, I
don't want to force you to come here."

Modest and reserved as Clarence was generally, I fear that bashfulness
of approach to the other sex was not one of these indications. He walked
up to Susy with appalling directness, and passed his arm around her
waist. She did not move, but remained looking at him and his intruding
arm with a certain critical curiosity, as if awaiting some novel
sensation. At which he kissed her. She then slowly disengaged his arm,
and said:--

"Really, upon my word, Clarence," in perfectly level tones, and slipped
quietly to the ground.

He again caught her in his arms, encircling her disarranged hair and
part of the beribboned hat hanging over her shoulder, and remained
for an instant holding her thus silently and tenderly. Then she freed
herself with an abstracted air, a half smile, and an unchanged color
except where her soft cheek had been abraded by his coat collar.

"You're a bold, rude boy, Clarence," she said, putting back her hair
quietly, and straightening the brim of her hat. "Heaven knows where
you learned manners!" and then, from a safer distance, with the same
critical look in her violet eyes, "I suppose you think mother would
allow THAT if she knew it?"

But Clarence, now completely subjugated, with the memory of the kiss
upon him and a heightened color, protested that he only wanted to make
their intercourse less constrained, and to have their relations, even
their engagement, recognized by her parents; still he would take her
advice. Only there was always the danger that if they were discovered
she would be sent back to the convent all the same, and his banishment,
instead of being the probation of a few years, would be a perpetual
separation.

"We could always run away, Clarence," responded the young girl calmly.
"There's nothing the matter with THAT."

Clarence was startled. The idea of desolating the sad, proud, handsome
Mrs. Peyton, whom he worshiped, and her kind husband, whom he was just
about to serve, was so grotesque and confusing, that he said hopelessly,
"Yes."

"Of course," she continued, with the same odd affectation of coyness,
which was, however, distinctly uncalled for,