He re-entered his own room and again threw himself into his chair.  His calm was being succeeded by a physical weariness; he remembered he had not slept the night before, and he ought to take some rest to be fresh in the early morning.  Yet he must also show himself before his self-invited guests,—­Susy and her husband,—­or their suspicions would be aroused.  He would try to sleep for a little while in the chair before he went downstairs again.  He closed his eyes oddly enough on a dim dreamy recollection of Susy in the old days, in the little madrono hollow where she had once given him a rendezvous.  He forgot the maturer and critical uneasiness with which he had then received her coquettish and willful advances, which he now knew was the effect of the growing dominance of Mrs. Peyton over him, and remembered only her bright, youthful eyes, and the kisses he had pressed upon her soft fragrant cheek.  The faintness he had felt when waiting in the old rose garden, a few hours ago, seemed to steal on him once more, and to lapse into a pleasant drowsiness.  He even seemed again to inhale the perfume of the roses.

“Clarence!”

He started.  He had been sleeping, but the voice sounded strangely real.

A light, girlish laugh followed.  He sprang to his feet.  It was Susy standing beside him—­and Susy even as she looked in the old days!

For with a flash of her old audacity, aided by her familiar knowledge of the house and the bunch of household keys she had found, which dangled from her girdle, as in the old fashion, she had disinterred one of her old frocks from a closet, slipped it on, and unloosening her brown hair had let it fall in rippling waves down her back.  It was Susy in her old girlishness, with the instinct of the grown actress in the arrangement of her short skirt over her pretty ankles and the half-conscious pose she had taken.

“Poor dear old Clarence,” she said, with dancing eyes; “I might have won a dozen pairs of gloves from you while you slept there.  But you’re tired, dear old boy, and you’ve had a hard time of it.  No matter; you’ve shown yourself a man at last, and I’m proud of you.”

Half ashamed of the pleasure he felt even in his embarrassment, Clarence stammered, “But this change—­this dress.”

Susy clapped her hands like a child.  “I knew it would surprise you!  It’s an old frock I wore the year I went away with auntie.  I knew where it was hidden, and fished it out again with these keys, Clarence; it seemed so like old times.  Lord! when I was with the old servants again, and you didn’t come down, I just felt as if I’d never been away, and I just rampaged free.  It seemed to me, don’t you know, not as if I’d just come, but as if I’d always been right here, and it was you who’d just come.  Don’t you understand!  Just as you came when me and Mary Rogers were here; don’t you remember her, Clarence, and how she used to do ‘gooseberry’ for us?  Well, just like that.  So I said to Jim,