t she? and you must love her very much."

Clarence colored with delight. It was true it had never occurred to him
to look at Susy in the light of a celestial visitant, and I fear he was
just then more struck with the fair complimenter than the compliment
to his companion, but he was pleased for her sake. He was not yet
old enough to be conscious of the sex's belief in its irresistible
domination over mankind at all ages, and that Johnny in his check apron
would be always a hopeless conquest of Jeannette in her pinafore, and
that he ought to have been in love with Susy.

Howbeit, the lady suddenly whisked her away to the recesses of her own
wagon, to reappear later, washed, curled, and beribboned like a new
doll, and Clarence was left alone with the husband and another of the
party.

"Well, my boy, you haven't told me your name yet."

"Clarence, sir."

"So Susy calls you, but what else?"

"Clarence Brant."

"Any relation to Colonel Brant?" asked the second man carelessly.

"He was my father," said the boy, brightening under this faint prospect
of recognition in his loneliness.

The two men glanced at each other. The leader looked at the boy
curiously, and said,--

"Are you the son of Colonel Brant, of Louisville?"

"Yes, sir," said the boy, with a dim stirring of uneasiness in his
heart. "But he's dead now," he added finally.

"Ah, when did he die?" said the man quickly.

"Oh, a long time ago. I don't remember him much. I was very little,"
said the boy, half apologetically.

"Ah, you don't remember him?"

"No," said Clarence shortly. He was beginning to fall back upon that
certain dogged repetition which in sensitive children arises from their
hopeless inability to express their deeper feelings. He also had an
instinctive consciousness that this want of a knowledge of his father
was part of that vague wrong that had been done him. It did not help his
uneasiness that he could see that one of the two men, who turned away
with a half-laugh, misunderstood or did not believe him.

"How did you come with the Silsbees?" asked the first man.

Clarence repeated mechanically, with a child's distaste of practical
details, how he had lived with an aunt at St. Jo, and how his stepmother
had procured his passage with the Silsbees to California, where he was
to meet his cousin. All this with a lack of interest and abstraction
that he was miserably conscious told against him, but he was yet
helpless to resist.

T