Thunder was in the air and a blow coming.  Sir Willoughby’s instincts were awake to the many signs, nor, though silenced, were they hushed by his harping on the frantic excesses to which women are driven by the passion of jealousy.  He believed in Clara’s jealousy because he really had intended to rouse it; under the form of emulation, feebly.  He could not suppose she had spoken of it to Vernon.  And as for the seriousness of her desire to be released from her engagement, that was little credible.  Still the fixing of an hour for her to speak to him after an interval of four-and-twenty hours, left an opening for the incredible to add its weight to the suspicious mass; and who would have fancied Clara Middleton so wild a victim of the intemperate passion!  He muttered to himself several assuaging observations to excuse a young lady half demented, and rejected them in a lump for their nonsensical inapplicability to Clara.  In order to obtain some sleep, he consented to blame himself slightly, in the style of the enamoured historian of erring beauties alluding to their peccadilloes.  He had done it to edify her.  Sleep, however, failed him.  That an inordinate jealousy argued an overpowering love, solved his problem until he tried to fit the proposition to Clara’s character.  He had discerned nothing southern in her.  Latterly, with the blushing Day in prospect, she had contracted and frozen.  There was no reading either of her or of the mystery.

In the morning, at the breakfast-table, a confession of sleeplessness was general.  Excepting Miss Dale and Dr. Middleton, none had slept a wink.  “I, sir,” the Doctor replied to Sir Willoughby, “slept like a lexicon in your library when Mr. Whitford and I are out of it.”

Vernon incidentally mentioned that he had been writing through the night.

“You fellows kill yourselves,” Sir Willoughby reproved him.  “For my part, I make it a principle to get through my work without self-slaughter.”

Clara watched her father for a symptom of ridicule.  He gazed mildly on the systematic worker.  She was unable to guess whether she would have in him an ally or a judge.  The latter, she feared.  Now that she had embraced the strife, she saw the division of the line where she stood from that one where the world places girls who are affianced wives; her father could hardly be with her; it had gone too far.  He loved her, but he would certainly take her to be moved by a maddish whim; he would not try to understand her case.  The scholar’s detestation of a disarrangement of human affairs that had been by miracle contrived to run smoothly, would of itself rank him against her; and with the world to back his view of her, he might behave like a despotic father.  How could she defend herself before him?  At one thought of Sir Willoughby, her tongue made ready, and feminine craft was alert to prompt it; but to her father she could imagine herself opposing only dumbness and obstinacy.