“One moment,” broke out Clarence, “you must hear me, now.  Foolish and misguided as that purchase may have been, I swear to you I had only one motive in making it,—­to save the homestead for you and your husband, who had been my first and earliest benefactors.  What the result of it was, you, as a business woman, know; your friends know; your lawyer will tell you the same.  You owe me nothing.  I have given you nothing but the repossession of this property, which any other man could have done, and perhaps less stupidly than I did.  I would not have forced you to come here to hear this if I had dreamed of your suspicions, or even if I had simply understood that you would see me in San Francisco as I passed through.”

“Passed through?  Where were you going?” she said quickly.

“To Sacramento.”

The abrupt change in her manner startled him to a recollection of Susy, and he blushed.  She bit her lips, and moved towards the window.

“Then you saw her?” she said, turning suddenly towards him.  The inquiry of her beautiful eyes was more imperative than her speech.

Clarence recognized quickly what he thought was his cruel blunder in touching the half-healed wound of separation.  But he had gone too far to be other than perfectly truthful now.

“Yes; I saw her on the stage,” he said, with a return of his boyish earnestness; “and I learned something which I wanted you to first hear from me.  She is married,—­and to Mr. Hooker, who is in the same theatrical company with her.  But I want you to think, as I honestly do, that it is the best for her.  She has married in her profession, which is a great protection and a help to her success, and she has married a man who can look lightly upon certain qualities in her that others might not be so lenient to.  His worst faults are on the surface, and will wear away in contact with the world, and he looks up to her as his superior.  I gathered this from her friend, for I did not speak with her myself; I did not go there to see her.  But as I expected to be leaving you soon, I thought it only right that as I was the humble means of first bringing her into your life, I should bring you this last news, which I suppose takes her out of it forever.  Only I want you to believe that you have nothing to regret, and that she is neither lost nor unhappy.”

The expression of suspicious inquiry on her face when he began changed gradually to perplexity as he continued, and then relaxed into a faint, peculiar smile.  But there was not the slightest trace of that pain, wounded pride, indignation, or anger, that he had expected to see upon it.

“That means, I suppose, Mr. Brant, that you no longer care for her?”

The smile had passed, yet she spoke now with a half-real, half-affected archness that was also unlike her.

“It means,” said Clarence with a white face, but a steady voice, “that I care for her now as much as I ever cared for her, no matter to what folly it once might have led me.  But it means, also, that there was no time when I was not able to tell it to you as frankly as I do now”—­