They passed under a Gothic archway and found themselves on a square green lawn, in the midst of which was another fountain in a genuine old marble basin, a Roman relic dug up thirty years ago in the peninsula of Portland. A cloistered walk surrounded this grass-plot. A striped awning had been put up beside the fountain, and under this the tea-table was spread. ‘Now, Lina, let us see if you can manage that ponderous tea-kettle,’ said Gerald. ‘It is the handsomest I ever saw,’ sleepily remarked Mrs. Ferrers, who had found the afternoon somewhat dreary, since nobody had seemed to want her advice about anything. ‘But I must confess that I prefer the Rector’s George the Second silver, and old Swansea cups and saucers, to the highest exemplars of modern art.’ CHAPTER XI. ‘YEVE ME MY DETH, OR THAT I HAVE A SHAME.’ Sir Vernon Lawford was sitting alone in his study on the morning after the visit to Goring Abbey, when the door opened suddenly with a sharp jerk, and his younger daughter stood before him. The very manner in which the door opened told him, before he looked up from his desk, that the intruder was Daphne, and not the always welcome Madoline. He looked at his daughter with cold severe eyes, as at a person who had no right to be there. Ever since she could remember, Daphne had feared her father much more than she loved him; but never had he seemed to her so awful a being as he appeared this morning in his own room, surrounded by all the symbols of power—the bronze bust of Cicero looking down at him from the bookcase; his despatch-box open at his side, bristling with pen-knives and paper-knives, and stern official stationery; his ponderous silver inkstand, presented by the Warwickshire yeomanry in acknowledgment of his merits as colonel; his russia-leather bound dictionaries and directories, and brazen letter-weighing machine—and all the pomp and circumstance of his business life about him. ‘Well, Daphne, what do you want?’ he asked, looking at her without a ray of sympathetic feeling in his handsome gray eyes. ‘If you please, papa,’ she faltered, blushing deeply under that severe gaze, and pleating up the edge of her lawn-tennis pinafore in supreme nervousness, ‘I don’t think I’m really finished.’ ‘Finished!’ he exclaimed, looking at her as if he thought she was an idiot. ‘Finished what? You never finish anything, or begin anything either, so far as I can hear, that is worth doing.’