squeness from the effect of the
checkered light and shade.

"You looked so tired and bored out there," she said. "I am afraid you
are finding it very dull at the rancho. The prospect is certainly not
very enlivening from where you stand."

Clarence protested with a visible pleasure in his eyes, as he held back
a spray before the opening.

"If you are not afraid of being worse bored, come in here and talk
with me. You have never seen this part of the house, I think,--my own
sitting-room. You reach it from the hall in the gallery. But Lola or
Anita will show you the way."

He reentered the gateway, and quickly found the hall,--a narrow, arched
passage, whose black, tunnel-like shadows were absolutely unaffected
by the vivid, colorless glare of the courtyard without, seen through an
opening at the end. The contrast was sharp, blinding, and distinct;
even the edges of the opening were black; the outer light halted on
the threshold and never penetrated within. The warm odor of verbena
and dried rose leaves stole from a half-open door somewhere in the
cloistered gloom. Guided by it, Clarence presently found himself on the
threshold of a low-vaulted room. Two other narrow embrasured windows
like the one he had just seen, and a fourth, wider latticed casement,
hung with gauze curtains, suffused the apartment with a clear, yet
mysterious twilight that seemed its own. The gloomy walls were warmed
by bright-fringed bookshelves, topped with trifles of light feminine
coloring and adornment. Low easy-chairs and a lounge, small fanciful
tables, a dainty desk, gayly colored baskets of worsteds or mysterious
kaleidoscopic fragments, and vases of flowers pervaded the apartment
with a mingled sense of grace and comfort. There was a womanly
refinement in its careless negligence, and even the delicate wrapper of
Japanese silk, gathered at the waist and falling in easy folds to the
feet of the graceful mistress of this charming disorder, looked a part
of its refined abandonment.

Clarence hesitated as on the threshold of some sacred shrine. But Mrs.
Peyton, with her own hands, cleared a space for him on the lounge.

"You will easily suspect from all this disorder, Mr. Brant, that I spend
a greater part of my time here, and that I seldom see much company. Mr.
Peyton occasionally comes in long enough to stumble over a footstool or
upset a vase, and I think Mary and Susy avoid it from a firm conviction
that there is work concealed in the