Meanwhile Mrs. Forest was anxious. Clara’s attention was being called away from the one string her mother constantly kept harping on—the reconciliation. Dr. Forest, however, encouraged the firm of “Dykes and Delano,” as he called it, and promised to put some money into the “concern.” He was delighted at Clara’s first successful idea. “What a thoroughly woman’s way of doing things,” he said. “No man would ever have had the cheek to impress a dressmaker into the flower business. Go on; you two women have good business notions, and you are sure of success.” Mrs. Forest heard these encouragements with inward pain, and finally, when she could not endure the silence of Clara’s husband any longer, she wrote to him herself. Her letter was a masterpiece of shallow tact. What he read very plainly “between the lines,” was, that he had only to whistle for Clara, and she would fly to him like a submissive spaniel; though Mrs. Forest had by no means intended to make him too confident. She had dwelt long upon the duty to society devolving upon married people, and upon the necessity of circumspect conduct in husbands. The answer came immediately, and was a triumph to Mrs. Forest, who lost no time in bringing the matter up before the doctor and Clara. That day Clara had felt wretched, and had kept her room. She had suffered one of those inevitable relapses, which all those who have “loved and lost” can perfectly understand. It is one of the tricks Love plays us, to leave an impress of his own divine beauty in the heart, through whatever form he has gained entrance there. Clara had been mourning her dead for months, and the agony had only returned on that day, as it had often returned before. The worst of it had been endured, when her father came in in the afternoon. “To-day is a bad day for you, darling, I see. Life is a grasshopper, isn’t it?” This was one of his distortions of the text, “The grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.” When Mrs. Forest came in, an hour later, Clara was lying on the lounge and the doctor was reading to her. Mrs. Forest, feeling in a very complaisant mood, and not wishing to present immediately the subject of Albert’s letter, sat down to her sewing, and begged the doctor to go on reading. He finished some ten pages of a critique on _Heat as a Mode of Motion_, by Professor Tyndall. “Well, I call that ponderous,” said Mrs. Forest, greatly relieved when the reading ended. “Do _you_ really find anything interesting in that, Clara?” “Certainly I do, mamma dear. Why do you ask?” “Well, it seems to me positive affectation. I can’t believe you understand that explanation of expansion by heat.”