As he ceased the song, Philip looked up for some comment or request. To his surprise, she only clasped her hands in a gesture that might have been either relief from or abandonment to woe, and bowed her head upon them. Puzzled, yet flattered by her emotion, he refrained from interrupting her; and, resuming his oars, lent the impetus of their stroke to that of the tide. Nothing was said until the keel grated upon the shelly beach opposite the farmhouse. Then, as Philip stooped to lift the unconscious Jeannie, he imagined that he discerned the gleam of the sinking moon upon Sarah's dripping eyelashes. The fancy pursued him after he had gone up to his room. Seated at his window, looking out upon the now starlit sky, he smoked more than one cigar before his musing fit was ended. It was not the love-reverie of a smitten boy. He believed that he had passed that stage of sentimentalism ten years before. That Southerner of the male gender who has not been consumed by the fires and risen as good as new from the ashes of half a dozen never-dying passions before he is eighteen, who has not offered the heart and hand, which as often as otherwise constitute his chiefest earthly possessions, to some elect fair one by the time he is one-and-twenty, is voted "slow" invulnerable. If these susceptible sons of a fervid clime did not take to love-making as naturally as does a duckling to the pond by the time the eggshell is fairly off its head, they would certainly be initiated while in the callow state by the rules and customs of society. Courtship is at first a pastime, then an art, then when the earnestness of a real attachment takes hold of their impassioned natures, it is the one all-absorbing, eager pursuit of existence, until rewarded by the acquisition of its object or thwarted by the decided refusal of the hard-hearted Dulcinea. This state of things, this code of Cupid, every Southern girl understands, and shapes her conduct accordingly. Sportively, yet warily, she plays around the hook, and he is a very fortunate angler who does not in the moment of fancied success discover that she has carried off the bait as a trophy upon which to feed her vanity, and left him to be the laughing-stock of the curious spectators of this double game. She is imperturbable to meaning equivoques, receives pretty speeches and tender glances at their current value, and not until the suit becomes close and ardent, the attachment palpable to every one else, and is confessed in so many words, does she allow herself to be persuaded that her adorer is "in earnest," and really desires to awaken a sympathetic emotion in her bosom.