ut this did not comprise all the picture upon which Mrs. Maria Owen
looked; for in the window, with the last rays of the dying daylight
falling upon face and figure, sat her daughter Emily, listlessly toying
with the leaves of a book that she had been reading until the light grew
too indistinct, and with a slight pout on her lip and an expression of
dissatisfaction generally distributed over her pretty face, which showed
that her own vexation and that of her mother had some kind of connection
more or less mysterious. The face was not only pretty, as every one
could see,--but softly rounded, womanly and most loveable while yet
girlish, as only those could fully realize who had known something of
the comparative characters of women. The eyes (in a better light) were
hazel, with a depth and transparency which made the very thought of a
mean action in her presence apparently impossible; the cheek that showed
against the fading light had been rounded to perfection in the soft
atmosphere floating about eighteen, as a peach is rounded and colored by
the genial air and sunshine of late summer: the heavy masses of hair
that had partially fallen out of their confinement and swept down to her
shoulders, were scarcely darker than nut-brown; and the hand toying with
the book would have shown, even without a better glimpse of the half
recumbent figure, that that figure was of medium height, fully rounded
and delicately voluptuous. It is not to be supposed that Emily Owen knew
quite all this of herself. Some others realized all her perfections,
however, as will more fully and at large appear (to use the
conveyancers' phraseology); and for the purposes of this narrative it is
necessary to have the lady distinctly before us.

And now what had caused the shadow on the matronly face of Mrs. Owen,
and the pout on the red lip of Emily? The old--old story: told over at
some period or other in almost every household on earth. Old eyes and
young eyes, seeing very differently; old hearts and young hearts,
beating to very different tunes, and informing the whole being with very
different aspirations. There was a love--there was a dislike--and there
was a certain amount of parental solicitude and determination--excellent
materials from which to construct a serious disagreement and an eventual
family row. Not Hecate, when she threw "eye of newt and tail of frog"
into the infernal brew on the blasted heath, could have been more
certain of the final