kept him clean among vulgar temptations; his clear perceptions were never blinded by selfish sophistry.  Meantime his feeling for Susy remained unchanged.  Pride had kept him from seeking the Peytons.  His present visit was as unpremeditated as Peyton’s invitation had been unlooked for by him.  Yet he had not allowed himself to be deceived.  He knew that this courtesy was probably due to the change in his fortune, although he had hoped it might have been some change in their opinion brought about by Susy.  But he would at least see her again, not in the pretty, half-clandestine way she had thought necessary, but openly and as her equal.

In his rapid ride he seemed to have suddenly penetrated the peaceful calm of the night.  The restless irritation of the afternoon trade winds had subsided; the tender moonlight had hushed and tranquilly possessed the worried plain; the unending files of wild oats, far spaced and distinct, stood erect and motionless as trees; something of the sedate solemnity of a great forest seemed to have fallen upon their giant stalks.  There was no dew.  In that light, dry air, the heavier dust no longer rose beneath the heels of his horse, whose flying shadow passed over the field like a cloud, leaving no trail or track behind it.  In the preoccupation of his thought and his breathless retrospect, the young man had ridden faster than he intended, and he now checked his panting horse.  The influence of the night and the hushed landscape stole over him; his thoughts took a gentler turn; in that dim, mysterious horizon line before him, his future seemed to be dreamily peopled with airy, graceful shapes that more or less took the likeness of Susy.  She was bright, coquettish, romantic, as he had last seen her; she was older, graver, and thoughtfully welcome of him; or she was cold, distant, and severely forgetful of the past.  How would her adopted father and mother receive him?  Would they ever look upon him in the light of a suitor to the young girl?  He had no fear of Peyton,—­he understood his own sex, and, young as he was, knew already how to make himself respected; but how could he overcome that instinctive aversion which Mrs. Peyton had so often made him feel he had provoked?  Yet in this dreamy hush of earth and sky, what was not possible?  His boyish heart beat high with daring visions.

He saw Mrs. Peyton in the porch, welcoming him with that maternal smile which his childish longing had so often craved to share with Susy.  Peyton would be there, too,—­Peyton, who had once pushed back his torn straw hat to look approvingly in his boyish eyes; and Peyton, perhaps, might be proud of him.

Suddenly he started.  A voice in his very ear!

“Bah!  A yoke of vulgar cattle grazing on lands that were thine by right and law.  Neither more nor less than that.  And I tell thee, Pancho, like cattle, to be driven off or caught and branded for one’s own.  Ha!  There are those who could swear to the truth of this on the Creed.  Ay! and bring papers stamped and signed by the governor’s rubric to prove it.  And not that I hate them,—­bah! what are those heretic swine to me?  But thou dost comprehend me?  It galls and pricks me to see them swelling themselves with stolen husks, and men like thee, Pancho, ousted from their own land.”