Susannah was a very different creature. She was a fair girl--rather pale, perhaps, when her features were in repose. She had rich soft flaxen hair, and dark blue eyes. She looked rather than spoke. Her words were few, her glances many. She was not necessarily silent in silence. On the contrary, her very silence had frequently a significance, taken with her looks, that needed no help from speech. She seemed to look through you at a glance, yet there was a liquid sweetness in her gaze, that disarmed it of all annoyance. If Emmeline was the glory of the sunlight--Susannah was the sovereign of the shade. If the song of the one filled you with exultation, that of the other awakened all your tenderness. If Emmeline was the creature for the dance,--Susannah was the wooing, beguiling Egeria, who could snatch you from yourself in the moments of respite and repose. For my part, I felt that I could spend all my mornings with the former, and all my evenings with the latter. Susannah with her large, blue, tearful eyes, and few, murmuring and always gentle accents, shone out upon me at nightfall as that last star that watches in the vault of night for the coming of the sapphire dawn. So much for the damsels. And all these fancies, not to say feelings, were the fruit of but three short days' acquaintance with their objects. But these were days when thoughts travel merrily and fast--when all that concerns the fancies and the affections, are caught up in a moment, as if the mind were nothing but a congeries of instincts, and the sensibilities, with a thousand delicate antennae, were ever on the grasp for prey. Squire Owens was a planter of tolerable condition. He was a widower, with these two lovely and lovable daughters--no more. But, bless you! Mine was no calculating heart. Very far from it. Neither the wealth of the father, nor the beauty of the girls, had yet prompted me to think of marriage. Life was pleasant enough as it was. Why burden it? Let well enough alone, say I. I had no wish to be happier. A wife never entered my thoughts. What might have come of being often with such damsels, there's no telling; but just then it was quite enough to dance with Emmeline, and muse with Susannah, and--_vive la bagatelle_!