The next perilous crisis through which Flora passed occurred later in time, and in Harry’s absence from home—which proved, nevertheless, a fortunate circumstance. Flora was grown, and had her first litter of puppies, which were taken from her and destroyed. Ill, sad—missing Harry as well as her puppies—the ordinarily quiet, well-behaved dog fretted herself into a very frenzy of destructiveness, under the influence of which she roamed in secret all over the house, gratifying her gnawing and tearing propensities. She got possession of a visitor’s ermine boa, and rent it in fragments. She was found ensconced in a spare bedroom, and established in the bed, the Marseilles quilt of which she had chewed till it was riddled with holes. Finally, she managed to secure a bandbox, containing two maid-servants’ Sunday bonnets, and made short work with the pink ribbons and the artificial flowers. Mrs. Bloomfield replaced the wholesale wreck; but she could stand such conduct no longer, though she was too well-informed a woman to fall into a panic, under the impression that the dog was mad. In reference to the right in Flora stringently asserted by Harry when he was a mere boy, she could not—now that her son was a big lad—do more than order the dog to be tied up, while she waited word from Harry in answer to her inquiry as to how his _protegée_ was to be disposed of. It happened to be the end of the week, when Harry frequently returned home from his public school to remain over the Sunday. And it had been noticed before that the dog was cognizant of these stated visits, and looked eagerly out for the arrival of her master. In the season allowed to Flora for cooling down and contrition, while she had the knowledge forced upon her that she could no longer rush to greet Harry with an open face and a clear conscience, but must be sought out by the lad, smarting under a fellow-feeling with her disgrace, Flora became so overpowered by the consequences of her previous self-indulgence of restless grief and longing, that she cast to the winds the silent endurance which had been from her youth a marked feature in the big, brave dog’s character. She refused to eat and sleep, and expressed her poignant regret and repentance, in a mode most unlike herself, by filling the air with her howls and moans. At the end of two days and nights Flora had howled herself perfectly hoarse, until Mrs. Bloomfield’s—not to say the curate’s—ears and hearts ached with the dog’s husky distress. In sheer self-defence they sent instructions to loose her, but to detain her a prisoner on parole, banished from their presence.