altation of
excitement brought on by the immediate necessity for action, followed by
a pallid calm, which the average spectator too often unfairly accepts as
incongruous, inadequate, or artificial. There had also occurred one
of those strange compensations that wait on Death or disrupture by
catastrophe: such as the rude shaking down of an unsettled life, the
forcible realization of what were vague speculations, the breaking of
old habits and traditions, and the unloosing of half-conscious bonds.
Mrs. Peyton, without insensibility to her loss or disloyalty to her
affections, nevertheless felt a relief to know that she was now really
Susy's guardian, free to order her new life wherever and under what
conditions she chose as most favorable to it, and that she could dispose
of this house that was wearying to her when Susy was away, and which
the girl herself had always found insupportable. She could settle this
question of Clarence's relations to her daughter out of hand without
advice or opposition. She had a brother in the East, who would be
summoned to take care of the property. This consideration for the living
pursued her, even while the dead man's presence still awed the hushed
house; it was in her thoughts as she stood beside his bier and adjusted
the flowers on his breast, which no longer moved for or against these
vanities; and it stayed with her even in the solitude of her darkened
room.

But if Mrs. Peyton was deficient, it was Susy who filled the popular
idea of a mourner, and whose emotional attitude of a grief-stricken
daughter left nothing to be desired. It was she who, when the house was
filled with sympathizing friends from San Francisco and the few near
neighbors who had hurried with condolences, was overflowing in her
reminiscences of the dead man's goodness to her, and her own undying
affection; who recalled ominous things that he had said, and strange
premonitions of her own, the result of her ever-present filial anxiety;
it was she who had hurried home that afternoon, impelled with vague
fears of some impending calamity; it was she who drew a picture of
Peyton as a doting and almost too indulgent parent, which Mary Rogers
failed to recognize, and which brought back vividly to Clarence's
recollection her own childish exaggerations of the Indian massacre. I
am far from saying that she was entirely insincere or merely acting at
these moments; at times she was taken with a mild hysteria, brought on
by th