Clara was the least fitted of all women to drag a log.  Few girls would be so rapid in exhausting capital.  She was feminine indeed, but she wanted comradeship, a living and frank exchange of the best in both, with the deeper feelings untroubled.  To be fixed at the mouth of a mine, and to have to descend it daily, and not to discover great opulence below; on the contrary, to be chilled in subterranean sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she could grasp, only the mystery of the inefficient tallow-light in those caverns of the complacent-talking man:  this appeared to her too extreme a probation for two or three weeks.  How of a lifetime of it!

She was compelled by her nature to hope, expect and believe that Sir Willoughby would again be the man she had known when she accepted him.  Very singularly, to show her simple spirit at the time, she was unaware of any physical coldness to him; she knew of nothing but her mind at work, objecting to this and that, desiring changes.  She did not dream of being on the giddy ridge of the passive or negative sentiment of love, where one step to the wrong side precipitates us into the state of repulsion.

Her eyes were lively at their meeting—­so were his.  She liked to see him on the steps, with young Crossjay under his arm.  Sir Willoughby told her in his pleasantest humour of the boy’s having got into the laboratory that morning to escape his task-master, and blown out the windows.  She administered a chiding to the delinquent in the same spirit, while Sir Willoughby led her on his arm across the threshold, whispering:  “Soon for good!” In reply to the whisper, she begged for more of the story of young Crossjay.  “Come into the laboratory,” said he, a little less laughingly than softly; and Clara begged her father to come and see young Crossjay’s latest pranks.  Sir Willoughby whispered to her of the length of their separation, and his joy to welcome her to the house where she would reign as mistress very won.  He numbered the weeks.  He whispered:  “Come.”  In the hurry of the moment she did not examine a lightning terror that shot through her.  It passed, and was no more than the shadow which bends the summer grasses, leaving a ruffle of her ideas, in wonder of her having feared herself for something.  Her father was with them.  She and Willoughby were not yet alone.

Young Crossjay had not accomplished so fine a piece of destruction as Sir Willoughby’s humour proclaimed of him.  He had connected a battery with a train of gunpowder, shattering a window-frame and unsettling some bricks.  Dr. Middleton asked if the youth was excluded from the library, and rejoiced to hear that it was a sealed door to him.  Thither they went.  Vernon Whitford was away on one of his long walks.

“There, papa, you see he is not so very faithful to you,” said Clara.