Indeed, the belligerent Jim had partly—­and of course darkly—­intimated something of this to Susy in their brief reunion at the casa during the few days that followed its successful reoccupation.  And Clarence, remembering her older caprices, and her remark on her first recognition of him, was quite surprised at the easy familiarity of her reception of this forgotten companion of their childhood.  But he was still more concerned in noticing, for the first time, a singular sympathetic understanding of each other, and an odd similarity of occasional action and expression between them.  It was a part of this monstrous peculiarity that neither the sympathy nor the likeness suggested any particular friendship or amity in the pair, but rather a mutual antagonism and suspicion.  Mrs. Peyton, coldly polite to Clarence’s former companion, but condescendingly gracious to his present tenant and retainer, did not notice it, preoccupied with the annoyance and pain of Susy’s frequent references to the old days of their democratic equality.

“You don’t remember, Jim, the time that you painted my face in the wagon, and got me up as an Indian papoose?” she said mischievously.

But Jim, who had no desire to recall his previous humble position before Mrs. Peyton or Clarence, was only vaguely responsive.  Clarence, although joyfully touched at this seeming evidence of Susy’s loyalty to the past, nevertheless found himself even more acutely pained at the distress it caused Mrs. Peyton, and was as relieved as she was by Hooker’s reticence.  For he had seen little of Susy since Peyton’s death, and there had been no repetition of their secret interviews.  Neither had he, nor she as far as he could judge, noticed the omission.  He had been more than usually kind, gentle, and protecting in his manner towards her, with little reference, however, to any response from her, yet he was vaguely conscious of some change in his feelings.  He attributed it, when he thought of it at all, to the exciting experiences through which he had passed; to some sentiment of responsibility to his dead friend; and to another secret preoccupation that was always in his mind.  He believed it would pass in time.  Yet he felt a certain satisfaction that she was no longer able to trouble him, except, of course, when she pained Mrs. Peyton, and then he was half conscious of taking the old attitude of the dead husband in mediating between them.  Yet so great was his inexperience that he believed, with pathetic simplicity of perception, that all this was due to the slow maturing of his love for her, and that he was still able to make her happy.  But this was something to be thought of later.  Just now Providence seemed to have offered him a vocation and a purpose that his idle adolescence had never known.  He did not dream that his capacity for patience was only the slow wasting of his love.