The statement, however, seemed to be partly ineffective.  Mary Rogers was startled but not alarmed, and even protested feebly.  “But,” she said, “if the father’s dead, what’s that to do with Clarence?  He was always with your papa—­so you told me, dear—­or other people, and couldn’t catch anything from his own father.  And I’m sure, dearest, he always seemed nice and quiet.”

“Yes, seemed,” returned Susy darkly, “but that’s all you know!  It was in his blood.  You know it always is,—­you read it in the books,—­you could see it in his eye.  There were times, my dear, when he was thwarted,—­when the slightest attention from another person to me revealed it!  I have kept it to myself,—­but think, dearest, of the effects of jealousy on that passionate nature!  Sometimes I tremble to look back upon it.”

Nevertheless, she raised her hands and threw back her lovely golden mane from her childish shoulders with an easy, untroubled gesture.  It was singular that Mary Rogers, leaning back comfortably in the buggy, also accepted these heart-rending revelations with comfortably knitted brows and luxuriously contented concern.  If she found it difficult to recognize in the picture just drawn by Susy the quiet, gentle, and sadly reserved youth she had known, she said nothing.  After a silence, lazily watching the distant wheeling vacquero, she said:—­

“And your father always sends an outrider like that with you?  How nice!  So picturesque—­and like the old Spanish days.”

“Hush!” said Susy, with another unutterable glance.

But this time Mary was in full sympathetic communion with her friend, and equal to any incoherent hiatus of revelation.

“No!” she said promptly, “you don’t mean it!”

“Don’t ask me, I daren’t say anything to papa, for he’d be simply furious.  But there are times when we’re alone, and Pedro wheels down so near with such a look in his black eyes, that I’m all in a tremble.  It’s dreadful!  They say he’s a real Briones,—­and he sometimes says something in Spanish, ending with ‘senorita,’ but I pretend I don’t understand.”

“And I suppose that if anything should happen to the ponies, he’d just risk his life to save you.”

“Yes,—­and it would be so awful,—­for I just hate him!”

“But if I was with you, dear, he couldn’t expect you to be as grateful as if you were alone.  Susy!” she continued after a pause, “if you just stirred up the ponies a little so as to make ’em go fast, perhaps he might think they’d got away from you, and come dashing down here.  It would be so funny to see him,—­wouldn’t it?”

The two girls looked at each other; their eyes sparkled already with a fearful joy,—­they drew a long breath of guilty anticipation.  For a moment Susy even believed in her imaginary sketch of Pedro’s devotion.

“Papa said I wasn’t to use the whip except in a case of necessity,” she said, reaching for the slender silver-handled toy, and setting her pretty lips together with the added determination of disobedience.  “G’long!”—­and she laid the lash smartly on the shining backs of the animals.