, with me,--although,"
loftily, "there may be a young unmarried gentleman alone there,--still I
fail to see any impropriety in it!"

He was still holding her; but in that instant her manner had completely
changed again; the old Susy seemed to have slipped away and evaded him,
and he was retaining only a conscious actress in his arms.

"Release me, Mr. Brant, please," she said, with a languid affected
glance behind her; "we are not alone."

Then, as the rustling of a skirt sounded nearer in the passage, she
seemed to change back to her old self once more, and with a lightning
flash of significance whispered,--

"She knows everything!"

To add to Clarence's confusion, the woman who entered cast a quick
glance of playful meaning on the separating youthful pair. She was an
ineffective blonde with a certain beauty that seemed to be gradually
succumbing to the ravages of paint and powder rather than years;
her dress appeared to have suffered from an equally unwise excess of
ornamentation and trimming, and she gave the general impression of
having been intended for exhibition in almost any other light than the
one in which she happened to be. There were two or three mud-stains
on the laces of her sleeve and underskirt that were obtrusively
incongruous. Her voice, which had, however, a ring of honest intention
in it, was somewhat over-strained, and evidently had not yet adjusted
itself to the low-ceilinged, conventual-like building.

"There, children, don't mind me! I know I'm not on in this scene, but I
got nervous waiting there, in what you call the 'salon,' with only those
Greaser servants staring round me in a circle, like a regular chorus.
My! but it's anteek here--regular anteek--Spanish." Then, with a glance
at Clarence, "So this is Clarence Brant,--your Clarence? Interduce me,
Susy."

In his confusion of indignation, pain, and even a certain conception of
the grim ludicrousness of the situation, Clarence grasped despairingly
at the single sentence of Susy's. "In my own home." Surely, at least, it
was HER OWN HOME, and as he was only the business agent of her adopted
mother, he had no right to dictate to her under what circumstances
she should return to it, or whom she should introduce there. In her
independence and caprice Susy might easily have gone elsewhere with this
astounding relative, and would Mrs. Peyton like it better? Clinging to
this idea, his instinct of hospitality asserted itself. He welcomed Mrs.