other. Women love the conquering
party,--it is the way of their sex. And poets, as we have seen, are
wellnigh irresistible when they exert their dangerous power of
fascination upon the female heart. But Clement was above jealousy; and,
if he perceived anything of this movement, took no notice of it.

He saw a good deal of his pretty Susan that day. She was tender in her
expressions and manners as usual, but there was a little something in
her looks and language from time to time that Clement did not know
exactly what to make of. She colored once or twice when the young poet's
name was mentioned. She was not so full of her little plans for the
future as she had sometimes been, "everything was so uncertain," she
said. Clement asked himself whether she felt quite as sure that her
attachment would last as she once did. But there were no reproaches, not
even any explanations, which are about as bad between lovers. There was
nothing but an undefined feeling on his side that she did not cling
quite so closely to him, perhaps, as he had once thought, and that, if
he had happened to have been drowned that day when he went down with the
beautiful young woman, it was just conceivable that Susan, who would
have cried dreadfully, no doubt, would in time have listened to
consolation from some other young man,--possibly from the young poet
whose verses he had been admiring. Easy-crying widows take new husbands
soonest; there is nothing like wet weather for transplanting, as Master
Gridley used to say. Susan had a fluent natural gift for tears, as
Clement well knew, after the exercise of which she used to brighten up
like the rose which had been washed, just washed in a shower, mentioned
by Cowper.

As for the poet, he learned more of his own sentiments during this visit
of Clement's than he had ever before known. He wandered about with a
dreadfully disconsolate look upon his countenance. He showed a
falling-off in his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and disturbed
his mother, for she had filled the house with fragrant suggestions of
good things coming, in honor of Mr. Lindsay, who was to be her guest at
tea. And chiefly the genteel form of doughnut called in the native
dialect _cymbal_ (_Qu._ Symbol? B. G.) which graced the board with its
plastic forms, suggestive of the most pleasing objects,--the spiral
ringlets pendent from the brow of beauty,--the magic circlet, which is
the pledge of plighted affection,--the indissoluble kn