“Papa,” said Constance, “I am going to make a suggestion which is a very bold one; perhaps you will be angry--but I don’t do it to make you angry; and, please, don’t answer me till you have thought a moment. It is just this--Why shouldn’t we go home?” “Go home!” The words flew from him in the shock and wonder. He grew pale as he stared at her, too much thunderstruck to be angry, as she said. Constance put up her hand to stop him. “I said, please don’t answer till you have thought.” And then they sat for a minute or more looking at each other from opposite sides of the table--in that pause which comes when a new and strange thought has been thrown into the midst of a turmoil which it has power to excite or to allay. Waring went through a great many phases of feeling while he looked at his young daughter sitting undaunted opposite to him, not afraid of him, treating him as no one else had done for years--as an equal, as a reasonable being, whose wishes were not to be deferred to superstitiously, but whose reasons for what he did and said were to be put to the test, as in the case of other men. And he knew that he could not beat down this cool and self-possessed girl, as fathers can usually crush the young creatures whom they have had it in their power to reprove and correct from their cradles. Constance was an independent intelligence. She was a gentlewoman, to whom he could not be rude any more than to the Queen. This hushed at once the indignant outcry on his lips. He said at last, calmly enough, with only a little sneer piercing through his forced smile, “We must take care, like other debaters, to define what we mean exactly by the phrases we use. Home, for example. What do you mean by home? My home, in the ordinary sense of the word, is here.”