spoke of changing YOUR position, I determined to
find out if it wasn't I who had to leave the house rather than you. One
moment, please. And I did find out, and it WAS I. Don't speak, please,
yet. And now," she said, with a quick return to her previous nervous
hilarity, "knowing this, as you did, and knowing, too, that I would know
it when I examined the papers,--don't speak, I'm not through yet,--don't
you think that it was just a LITTLE cruel for you to try to hurry me,
and make me come here instead of your coming to ME in San Francisco,
when I gave you leave for that purpose?"

"But, Mrs. Peyton," gasped Clarence.

"Please don't interrupt me," said the lady, with a touch of her old
imperiousness, "for in a moment I must join my guests. When I found you
wouldn't tell me, and left it to me to find out, I could only go away
as I did, and really leave you to control what I believed was your own
property. And I thought, too, that I understood your motives, and, to be
frank with you, that worried me; for I believed I knew the disposition
and feelings of a certain person better than yourself."

"One moment," broke out Clarence, "you MUST hear me, now. Foolish and
misguided as that purchase may have been, I swear to you I had only one
motive in making it,--to save the homestead for you and your husband,
who had been my first and earliest benefactors. What the result of it
was, you, as a business woman, know; your friends know; your lawyer will
tell you the same. You owe me nothing. I have given you nothing but the
repossession of this property, which any other man could have done, and
perhaps less stupidly than I did. I would not have forced you to come
here to hear this if I had dreamed of your suspicions, or even if I had
simply understood that you would see me in San Francisco as I passed
through."

"Passed through? Where were you going?" she said quickly.

"To Sacramento."

The abrupt change in her manner startled him to a recollection of Susy,
and he blushed. She bit her lips, and moved towards the window.

"Then you saw her?" she said, turning suddenly towards him. The inquiry
of her beautiful eyes was more imperative than her speech.

Clarence recognized quickly what he thought was his cruel blunder in
touching the half-healed wound of separation. But he had gone too far to
be other than perfectly truthful now.

"Yes; I saw her on the stage," he said, with a return of his boyish
earnestness; "and I learned