This was all so like her old, childlike, charming, irresponsible self, that Clarence, troubled and bewildered as he was, took her hands and drew her like a child towards him.

“Of course,” she went on, yet stopping to smell a rosebud in his buttonhole, “I have a perfect right to come to my own home, goodness knows! and if I bring my own aunt, a married woman, with me,—­although,” loftily, “there may be a young unmarried gentleman alone there,—­still I fail to see any impropriety in it!”

He was still holding her; but in that instant her manner had completely changed again; the old Susy seemed to have slipped away and evaded him, and he was retaining only a conscious actress in his arms.

“Release me, Mr. Brant, please,” she said, with a languid affected glance behind her; “we are not alone.”

Then, as the rustling of a skirt sounded nearer in the passage, she seemed to change back to her old self once more, and with a lightning flash of significance whispered,—­

“She knows everything!”

To add to Clarence’s confusion, the woman who entered cast a quick glance of playful meaning on the separating youthful pair.  She was an ineffective blonde with a certain beauty that seemed to be gradually succumbing to the ravages of paint and powder rather than years; her dress appeared to have suffered from an equally unwise excess of ornamentation and trimming, and she gave the general impression of having been intended for exhibition in almost any other light than the one in which she happened to be.  There were two or three mud-stains on the laces of her sleeve and underskirt that were obtrusively incongruous.  Her voice, which had, however, a ring of honest intention in it, was somewhat over-strained, and evidently had not yet adjusted itself to the low-ceilinged, conventual-like building.

“There, children, don’t mind me!  I know I’m not on in this scene, but I got nervous waiting there, in what you call the ‘salon,’ with only those Greaser servants staring round me in a circle, like a regular chorus.  My! but it’s anteek here—­regular anteek—­Spanish.”  Then, with a glance at Clarence, “So this is Clarence Brant,—­your Clarence?  Interduce me, Susy.”

In his confusion of indignation, pain, and even a certain conception of the grim ludicrousness of the situation, Clarence grasped despairingly at the single sentence of Susy’s.  “In my own home.”  Surely, at least, it was her own home, and as he was only the business agent of her adopted mother, he had no right to dictate to her under what circumstances she should return to it, or whom she should introduce there.  In her independence and caprice Susy might easily have gone elsewhere with this astounding relative, and would Mrs. Peyton like it better?  Clinging to this idea, his instinct of hospitality asserted itself.  He welcomed Mrs. McClosky with nervous effusion:—­

“I am only Mrs. Peyton’s major domo here, but any guest of her daughter’s is welcome.”