“Said I wanted to see you?” repeated Susy, with her blue eyes lifted in celestial scorn and wonderment. “Said I wanted to see you? Are you not mistaken, Mr. Brant? Really, I imagined that you came here to see ME.” With her fair head upturned, and the leaf of her scarlet lip temptingly curled over, Clarence began to think this latest phase of her extravagance the most fascinating. He drew nearer to her as he said gently, “You know what I mean, Susy. You said yesterday you were troubled. I thought you might have something to tell me.” “I should think it was YOU who might have something to tell me after all these years,” she said poutingly, yet self-possessed. “But I suppose you came here only to see Mary and mother. I'm sure you let them know that plainly enough last evening.” “But you said”--began the stupefied Clarence. “Never mind what I said. It's always what I say, never what YOU say; and you don't say anything.” The woodland influence must have been still very strong upon Clarence that he did not discover in all this that, while Susy's general capriciousness was unchanged, there was a new and singular insincerity in her manifest acting. She was either concealing the existence of some other real emotion, or assuming one that was absent. But he did not notice it, and only replied tenderly:-- “But I want to say a great deal to you, Susy. I want to say that if you still feel as I do, and as I have always felt, and you think you could be happy as I would be if--if--we could be always together, we need not conceal it from your mother and father any longer. I am old enough to speak for myself, and I am my own master. Your mother has been very kind to me,--so kind that it doesn't seem quite right to deceive her,--and when I tell her that I love you, and that I want you to be my wife, I believe she will give us her blessing.” Susy uttered a strange little laugh, and with an assumption of coyness, that was, however, still affected, stooped to pick a few berries from a manzanita bush. “I'll tell you what she'll say, Clarence. She'll say you're frightfully young, and so you are!” The young fellow tried to echo the laugh, but felt as if he had received a blow. For the first time he was conscious of the truth: this girl, whom he had fondly regarded as a child, had already passed him in the race; she had become a woman before he was yet a man, and now stood before him, maturer in her knowledge, and older in her understanding, of herself and of him. This was the change that had perplexed him; this was the presence that had come between them,--a Susy he had never known before.