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.

She laughed at his changed expression, and then swung herself easily to a sitting posture on the low projecting branch of a hemlock.  The act was still girlish, but, nevertheless, she looked down upon him in a superior, patronizing way.  “Now, Clarence,” she said, with a half-abstracted manner, “don’t you be a big fool!  If you talk that way to mother, she’ll only tell you to wait two or three years until you know your own mind, and she’ll pack me off to that horrid school again, besides watching me like a cat every moment you are here.  If you want to stay here, and see me sometimes like this, you’ll just behave as you have done, and say nothing.  Do you see?  Perhaps you don’t care to come, or are satisfied with Mary and mother.  Say so, then.  Goodness knows, I don’t want to force you to come here.”

Modest and reserved as Clarence was generally, I fear that bashfulness of approach to the other sex was not one of these indications.  He walked up to Susy with appalling directness, and passed his arm around her waist.  She did not move, but remained looking at him and his intruding arm with a certain critical curiosity, as if awaiting some novel sensation.  At which he kissed her.  She then slowly disengaged his arm, and said:—­

“Really, upon my word, Clarence,” in perfectly level tones, and slipped quietly to the ground.

He again caught her in his arms, encircling her disarranged hair and part of the beribboned hat hanging over her shoulder, and remained for an instant holding her thus silently and tenderly.  Then she freed herself with an abstracted air, a half smile, and an unchanged color except where her soft cheek had been abraded by his coat collar.

“You’re a bold, rude boy, Clarence,” she said, putting back her hair quietly, and straightening the brim of her hat.  “Heaven knows where you learned manners!” and then, from a safer distance, with the same critical look in her violet eyes, “I suppose you think mother would allow that if she knew it?”

But Clarence, now completely subjugated, with the memory of the kiss upon him and a heightened color, protested that he only wanted to make their intercourse less constrained, and to have their relations, even their engagement, recognized by her parents; still he would take her advice.  Only there was always the danger that if they were discovered she would be sent back to the convent all the same, and his banishment, instead of being the probation of a few years, would be a perpetual separation.