She looked so irresponsible, sitting there with her face near his, and so childishly, or perhaps thoughtlessly, happy, that he could only admire her levity, and even the slight shock that her flippant allusion to his wife had given him seemed to him only a weakness of his own.  After all, was not hers the true philosophy?  Why should not these bright eyes see things more clearly than his own?  Nevertheless, with his eyes still fixed upon them, he continued,—­

“And Jim was willing to go?”

She stopped, with her fingers still lifting a lock of his hair.  “Why, yes, you silly—­why shouldn’t he?  I’d like to see him refuse.  Why, Lord!  Jim will do anything I ask him.”  She put down the lock of hair, and suddenly looking full into his eyes, said, “That’s just the difference between him and me, and you and—­that woman!”

“Then you love him!”

“About as much as you love her,” she said, with an unaffected laugh; “only he don’t wind me around his finger.”

No doubt she was right for all her thoughtlessness, and yet he was going to fight about that woman to-morrow!  No—­he forgot; he was going to fight Captain Pinckney because he was like her!

Susy had put her finger on the crease between his brows which this supposition had made, and tried to rub it out.

“You know it as well as I do, Clarence,” she said, with a pretty wrinkling of her own brows, which was her nearest approach to thoughtfulness.  “You know you never really liked her, only you thought her ways were grander and more proper than mine, and you know you were always a little bit of a snob and a prig too—­dear boy.  And Mrs. Peyton was—­bless my soul!—­a Benham and a planter’s daughter, and I—­I was only a picked-up orphan!  That’s where Jim is better than you—­now sit still, goosey!—­even if I don’t like him as much.  Oh, I know what you’re always thinking, you’re thinking we’re both exaggerated and theatrical, ain’t you?  But don’t you think it’s a heap better to be exaggerated and theatrical about things that are just sentimental and romantic than to be so awfully possessed and overcome about things that are only real?  There, you needn’t stare at me so!  It’s true.  You’ve had your fill of grandeur and propriety, and—­here you are.  And,” she added with a little chuckle, as she tucked up her feet and leaned a little closer to him, “here’s me.”

He did not speak, but his arm quite unconsciously passed round her small waist.

“You see, Clarence,” she went on with equal unconsciousness of the act, “you ought never to have let me go—­never!  You ought to have kept me here—­or run away with me.  And you oughtn’t to have tried to make me proper.  And you oughtn’t to have driven me to flirt with that horrid Spaniard, and you oughtn’t to have been so horribly cold and severe when I did.  And you oughtn’t to have made me take up with Jim, who was the only one who thought me his equal.  I might have been