"SUSPENSE." 71
suggestion only hovered in the light of a suspicion, and did
not settle in the form of a conviction in people's minds.
 As good or ill luck would have it, Harry had a half-holiday,
and proposed gallantly to escort his mother round the offices,
offering her his arm for the purpose. The two proceeded,
chatting easily, the best of friends, past the kitchen garden,
the paddock where the Guernsey cow and her calf fed, the
shed where the pony phaeton stood, and the stable which held
the curate's cob, and his wife and Harry's ponies. The pair
came in course of time opposite the door of the well-ordered
hen-house, or the hennery, as some ladies of Mrs. Bloomfield's
acquaintance, ambitious of euphemism, preferred to term it.
There was an unusual commotion about the place; the door,
with its crescent hole for hens to enter or issue at pleasure,
had been forced ajar, and at the very moment when Mrs.
Bloomfield and her son appeared on the scene it was driven
still more violently open. There rushed out a loudly protest-
ing, terrified hen-mother, with all her black feathers ruffled, and
some of them half pulled out, hanging by the tips of the pens.
Behind her tore along Flora, not subdued and decorous, as
we have seen her, but inflamed with riot and in hot pursuit.
Her jaws were dripping yellow with the yolks of eggs, to
which was added, in horrid significance, a fringe of the fluffy
down which is the covering of recently hatched chickens.
 The sight struck Mrs. Bloomfield and Harry dumb. She
had too much feeling for her son, as the master of Flora, to
say a word to him at first. He could not bring forward a
syllable in defence of the dog, caught red-handed, or yellow
and feathery jawed-which came to the same thing-in this
instance.