Celia wrote next day to her brother to tell him how that most incomprehensible of husbands, John Treverton, was expected home from Buenos Ayres, and how his wife was going to Plymouth to meet him. ‘And I never saw any human creature look so happy in my life,’ wrote Celia. ‘I have seen dogs look like it when one has given them biscuits, and cats when they sit blinking at the fire, and young pigs lying on a bank in the sunshine. Yes, I have seen those dumb things appear the image of perfect, unreasoning, unquestioning happiness, which looks neither behind nor before; but such an expression is rarely to be seen in humanity.’ A nice letter for Edward Clare to get--disappointed, more or less out at elbows, with a growing sense of failure upon him, sick to death of his London lodging, sick of the few literary men whose acquaintance he had contrived to make, and with whom he did not amalgamate as well as he had anticipated. He tore his sister’s lively epistle into morsels and sent them flying over Waterloo Bridge, upon the light summer wind, and felt as if he would like to have gone over with them. ‘Yet once I thought she loved me,’ he said to himself, ‘and so she did, before that plausible scoundrel came in her way. But I ought to remember how much she gains by loving him. If the old man had happened to leave me his estate, perhaps she might have looked unutterably happy at the idea of my return after a long absence. Only God, who made women, knows what hypocrites they are;’ and then Mr. Clare went home to his shabby lodging, and sat down in bitterest mood, and dipped his pen in the ink, and wrung out of himself a passionate page of verse for one of the magazines--not without labour and the sweat of his brow--and then took his poem and sold it, and dined luxuriously on the proceeds, hugging his wrongs and nursing his wrath to keep it warm, as he sat in a corner of the bright little French restaurant he liked best, slowly sipping his modest half-bottle of Pomard. That which Celia had told him was perfectly true. There never was a happier woman than Laura, after that interview by the river. During the last week before her departure she was full of business, preparing for her husband’s return. ‘Your master will be here in a few weeks,’ she said to the old housekeeper, with infinite pride, ‘and we must have everything ready for him.’ ‘So we will, ma’am, spick and span,’ answered Mrs. Trimmer. ‘It will be happiness to have him settle down among us. It must have been a sore trial to you both, to be parted so, just at the beginning of your married life, too. It would have come more nat’ral afterwards.’ ‘It was a sore trial, Trimmer,’ Mrs. Treverton answered, full of confidential friendliness. ‘But it’s all over now. I could hardly have borne to speak about it before.’