ell me."

He did not speak, but answered her blue eyes and then her lips, as her
arms slipped quite naturally around his neck.

*****

The dawn was breaking as Clarence and Jim Hooker emerged together from
the gate of the casa. Mr. Hooker looked sleepy. He had found, after his
return from Fair Plains, that his host had an early engagement at
Santa Inez, and he had insisted upon rising to see him off. It was with
difficulty, indeed, that Clarence could prevent his accompanying him.
Clarence had not revealed to Susy the night before the real object of
his journey, nor did Hooker evidently suspect it, yet when the former
had mounted his horse, he hesitated for an instant, extending his hand.

"If I should happen to be detained," he began with a half smile.

But Jim was struggling with a yawn. "That's all right--don't mind us,"
he said, stretching his arms. Clarence's hesitating hand dropped to his
side, and with a light reckless laugh and a half sense of providential
relief he galloped away.

What happened immediately thereafter during his solitary ride to
Santa Inez, looking back upon it in after years, seemed but a confused
recollection, more like a dream. The long stretches of vague distance,
gradually opening clearer with the rising sun in an unclouded sky;
the meeting with a few early or belated travelers and his unconscious
avoidance of them, as if they might know of his object; the black
shadows of foreshortened cattle rising before him on the plain and
arousing the same uneasy sensation of their being waylaying men; the
wondering recognition of houses and landmarks he had long been familiar
with; his purposeless attempts to recall the circumstances in which
he had known them--all these were like a dream. So, too, were the
recollections of the night before, the episode with Susy, already
mingled and blended with the memory of their previous past; his futile
attempts to look forward to the future, always, however, abandoned
with relief at the thought that the next few hours might make them
unnecessary. So also was the sudden realization that Santa Inez was
before him, when he had thought he was not yet halfway there, and as
he dismounted before the Court House his singular feeling--followed,
however, by no fear or distress--was that he had come so early to the
rendezvous that he was not yet quite prepared for it.

This same sense of unreality pervaded his meeting with the deputy
sheriff, at the news that the