Abandoning any further inquisition for the present, she let the talk naturally fall upon the books scattered about the tables.  The young man knew them all far better than she did, with a cognate knowledge of others of which she had never heard.  She found herself in the attitude of receiving information from this boy, whose boyishness, however, seemed to have evaporated, whose tone had changed with the subject, and who now spoke with the conscious reserve of knowledge.  Decidedly, she must have grown rusty in her seclusion.  This came, she thought bitterly, of living alone; of her husband’s preoccupation with the property; of Susy’s frivolous caprices.  At the end of eight years to be outstripped by a former cattle-boy of her husband’s, and to have her French corrected in a matter of fact way by this recent pupil of the priests, was really too bad!  Perhaps he even looked down upon Susy!  She smiled dangerously but suavely.

“You must have worked so hard to educate yourself from nothing, Mr. Brant.  You couldn’t read, I think, when you first came to us.  No?  Could you really?  I know it has been very difficult for Susy to get on with her studies in proportion.  We had so much to first eradicate in the way of manners, style, and habits of thought which the poor child had picked up from her companions, and for which she was not responsible.  Of course, with a boy that does not signify,” she added, with feline gentleness.

But the barbed speech glanced from the young man’s smoothly smiling abstraction.

“Ah, yes.  But those were happy days, Mrs. Peyton,” he answered, with an exasperating return of his previous boyish enthusiasm, “perhaps because of our ignorance.  I don’t think that Susy and I are any happier for knowing that the plains are not as flat as we believed they were, and that the sun doesn’t have to burn a hole in them every night when it sets.  But I know I believed that you knew everything.  When I once saw you smiling over a book in your hand, I thought it must be a different one from any that I had ever seen, and perhaps made expressly for you.  I can see you there still.  Do you know,” quite confidentially, “that you reminded me—­of course you were much younger—­of what I remembered of my mother?”

But Mrs. Peyton’s reply of “Ah, indeed,” albeit polite, indicated some coldness and lack of animation.  Clarence rose quickly, but cast a long and lingering look around him.

“You will come again, Mr. Brant,” said the lady more graciously.  “If you are going to ride now, perhaps you would try to meet Mr. Peyton.  He is late already, and I am always uneasy when he is out alone,—­particularly on one of those half-broken horses, which they consider good enough for riding here.  You have ridden them before and understand them, but I am afraid that’s another thing we have got to learn.”