Her voice did not, however, exhibit that exquisite maternal tenderness which the beatific vision ought to have called up, and the persistent voice of Clarence could not be evaded in the shadow.

“I said you reminded me of my mother,” he went on at her side, “because I knew her and lost her only as a child.  She never was anything to me but a memory, and yet an ideal of all that was sweet and lovable in woman.  Perhaps it was a dream of what she might have been when she was as young in years as you.  If it pleases you still to misunderstand me, it may please you also to know that there is a reminder of her even in this.  I have no remembrance of a word of affection from her, nor a caress; I have been as hopeless in my love for her who was my mother, as of the woman I would make my wife.”

“But you have seen no one, you know no one, you are young, you scarcely know your own self!  You will forget this, you will forget me!  And if—­if—­I should—­listen to you, what would the world say, what would you yourself say a few years hence?  Oh, be reasonable.  Think of it,—­it would be so wild,—­so mad! so—­so—­utterly ridiculous!”

In proof of its ludicrous quality, two tears escaped her eyes in the darkness.  But Clarence caught the white flash of her withdrawn handkerchief in the shadow, and captured her returning hand.  It was trembling, but did not struggle, and presently hushed itself to rest in his.

“I’m not only a fool but a brute,” he said in a lower voice.  “Forgive me.  I have given you pain,—­you, for whom I would have died.”

They had both stopped.  He was still holding her sleeping hand.  His arm had stolen around the burnous so softly that it followed the curves of her figure as lightly as a fold of the garment, and was presumably unfelt.  Grief has its privileges, and suffering exonerates a questionable situation.  In another moment her fair head might have dropped upon his shoulder.  But an approaching voice uprose in the adjoining broad allee.  It might have been the world speaking through the voice of the lawyer Sanderson.

“Yes, he is a good fellow, and an intelligent fellow, too, but a perfect child in his experience of mankind.”

They both started, but Mrs. Peyton’s hand suddenly woke up and grasped his firmly.  Then she said in a higher, but perfectly level tone:—­

“Yes, I think with you we had better look at it again in the sunlight to-morrow.  But here come our friends; they have probably been waiting for us to join them and go in.”

* * * * *

The wholesome freshness of early morning was in the room when Clarence awoke, cleared and strengthened.  His resolution had been made.  He would leave the rancho that morning, to enter the world again and seek his fortune elsewhere.  This was only right to her, whose future it should never be said he had imperiled by his folly and inexperience; and if, in a year or two of struggle he could prove his right to address her again, he would return.  He had not spoken to her since they had parted in the garden, with the grim truths of the lawyer ringing in his ears, but he had written a few lines of farewell, to be given to her after he had left.  He was calm in his resolution, albeit a little pale and hollow-eyed for it.