, 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 assuageing 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 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
