Clarence protested with a visible pleasure in his eyes, as he held back a spray before the opening.

“If you are not afraid of being worse bored, come in here and talk with me.  You have never seen this part of the house, I think,—­my own sitting-room.  You reach it from the hall in the gallery.  But Lola or Anita will show you the way.”

He reentered the gateway, and quickly found the hall,—­a narrow, arched passage, whose black, tunnel-like shadows were absolutely unaffected by the vivid, colorless glare of the courtyard without, seen through an opening at the end.  The contrast was sharp, blinding, and distinct; even the edges of the opening were black; the outer light halted on the threshold and never penetrated within.  The warm odor of verbena and dried rose leaves stole from a half-open door somewhere in the cloistered gloom.  Guided by it, Clarence presently found himself on the threshold of a low-vaulted room.  Two other narrow embrasured windows like the one he had just seen, and a fourth, wider latticed casement, hung with gauze curtains, suffused the apartment with a clear, yet mysterious twilight that seemed its own.  The gloomy walls were warmed by bright-fringed bookshelves, topped with trifles of light feminine coloring and adornment.  Low easy-chairs and a lounge, small fanciful tables, a dainty desk, gayly colored baskets of worsteds or mysterious kaleidoscopic fragments, and vases of flowers pervaded the apartment with a mingled sense of grace and comfort.  There was a womanly refinement in its careless negligence, and even the delicate wrapper of Japanese silk, gathered at the waist and falling in easy folds to the feet of the graceful mistress of this charming disorder, looked a part of its refined abandonment.

Clarence hesitated as on the threshold of some sacred shrine.  But Mrs. Peyton, with her own hands, cleared a space for him on the lounge.

“You will easily suspect from all this disorder, Mr. Brant, that I spend a greater part of my time here, and that I seldom see much company.  Mr. Peyton occasionally comes in long enough to stumble over a footstool or upset a vase, and I think Mary and Susy avoid it from a firm conviction that there is work concealed in these baskets.  But I have my books here, and in the afternoons, behind these thick walls, one forgets the incessant stir and restlessness of the dreadful winds outside.  Just now you were foolish enough to tempt them while you were nervous, or worried, or listless.  Take my word for it, it’s a great mistake.  There is no more use fighting them, as I tell Mr. Peyton, than of fighting the people born under them.  I have my own opinion that these winds were sent only to stir this lazy race of mongrels into activity, but they are enough to drive us Anglo-Saxons into nervous frenzy.  Don’t you think so?  But you are young and energetic, and perhaps you are not affected by them.”