70 "SUSPENSE."
puppyhood; if Mrs. Bloomfield saw no reason to change her
mind at any point of Flora's career, and cause the dog to be
consigned, after all, to the water-hole in the furze quarry, by
common consent-the grave of all the criminal, mangy, for-
saken dogs in the parish of Rushbrook.
 As the best of dogs, like the best of men, are fallible,
Flora may be said to have grown up under a sentence of
death, and was only spared by a succession of reprieves from
the execution of the warrant. Once or twice she made very
narrow escapes, and perhaps her rescue was due to more than
Harry's powers of piteous pleading. She had been gradually,
by the pertinacious efforts of her master, introduced into the
house, instead of living at the stables with her mother,
according to Mrs. Bloomfield's original decree, and so had
established a claim of familiarity on the regard of the stern
censor herself.
 Two marked instances of Flora's rubbing shoulders with
that eminence above the water-hole in the quarry, which may
be compared to the Tarpeian Rock, are on record.
 Mrs. Bloomfield, who prided herself on her success in her
poultry yard, had to listen at one period to various mysterious
and doleful accounts from her cook and boy-of-all-work on
the inexplicable disappearance of new-laid eggs and newly-
fledged chickens. As there were no disreputable characters
about, and neither fox nor hawk in the vicinity, and as the
innocence of Flora's mother was as well established as the
incorruptibility of the parsonage servants who brought the
reports, a grave suspicion attached from the beginning to
Flora as the depredator. But in the absence of positive
proof, and in the face of Harry's indignant denial, the dark