vanities; and it stayed with her even in the solitude of her darkened
room.
But if Mrs. Peyton was deficient, it was Susy who filled the popular
idea of a mourner, and whose emotional attitude of a grief-stricken
daughter left nothing to be desired. It was she who, when the house was
filled with sympathizing friends from San Francisco and the few near
neighbors who had hurried with condolences, was overflowing in her
reminiscences of the dead man's goodness to her, and her own undying
affection; who recalled ominous things that he had said, and strange
premonitions of her own, the result of her ever-present filial anxiety;
it was she who had hurried home that afternoon, impelled with vague
fears of some impending calamity; it was she who drew a picture of
Peyton as a doting and almost too indulgent parent, which Mary Rogers
failed to recognize, and which brought back vividly to Clarence's
recollection her own childish exaggerations of the Indian massacre. I
am far from saying that she was entirely insincere or merely acting at
these moments; at times she was taken with a mild hysteria, brought on
by the exciting intrusion of this real event in her monotonous life,
by the attentions of her friends, the importance of her suffering as an
only child, and the advancement of her position as the heiress of the
Robles Rancho. If her tears were near the surface, they were at least
genuine, and filmed her violet eyes and reddened her pretty eyelids
quite as effectually as if they had welled from the depths of her being.
Her black frock lent a matured dignity to her figure, and paled her
delicate complexion with the refinement of suffering. Even Clarence was
moved in that dark and haggard abstraction that had settled upon him
since his strange outbreak over the body of his old friend.
The extent of that change had not been noticed by Mrs. Peyton, who
had only observed that Clarence had treated her grief with a grave and
silent respect. She was grateful for that. A repetition of his boyish
impulsiveness would have been distasteful to her at such a moment. She
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