Duty dictated a struggle for the latter. He affected a manner of equable unconcern fairly well. "No one," said he, "unless you were to make a confidante of...." He stopped short of saying "Marianne," conscious of difficulties ahead. But he could shelve the side-issue, and fall back on the previous question with a sense of getting out of shoal water. "There _was_ a row, then ... well--a warm discussion, suppose we say? It's more refined, certainly. What form did it take?" "Then we mustn't go so quick," said Judith. "Or I shan't have time." She was inconsecutive; but it was clear, when she paused in her walk through the long grass, that it was for an anchorage. "Suppose we sit down a little here," she said. "Unless you mind?" Challis didn't. "Here" was an oak trunk that must have said to itself when it was a sapling--four hundred years ago, maybe--"I will see to it, when I am grown up, that my roots shall live above ground, and be thick with moss; and one shall be horizontal and a seat for a king, who shall lean against me contented. But he shall go, that lovers may come; and they shall make up _my_ contentment, and I shall hear their voices in the twilight." Challis half made this little legend as he took his place by Miss Arkroyd on that tree-trunk. But he fought shy of the sequel their presence suggested--what word ought his fancy to supply as the tree's imaginary speech about themselves? He shrank from it, and he knew the reason why. It was because, as his own disordered passion grew, as he found himself more and more at loggerheads with his lot, he became more and more alive to the danger of relying on this woman _her_self as his protection against _him_self. How if _she_ gave way, too? As far as any conscious loss of self-control at that moment went, on the part of Miss Judith Arkroyd, Challis need not have fretted. Never was a young woman more perfectly cool and collected, more equal to any occasion that might arise in connection with a love of power that she just felt this man was a satisfactory lay-figure for. That best defines all the feeling she had on his account--so far. She resumed the conversation where the question of anchorage had interrupted her. "I don't think we have rows in our family, in the ordinary sense of the word. That is, if I understand it rightly.... No!--I know what you are going to say. It has nothing to do with that repose that marks the caste of Vere de Vere. It is entirely individual and local. We have our quarrels, of course, but they take the form of distant civility, entirely due, as I understand, to our self-respect. There is nothing we Arkroyds respect more than ourselves, not even the Bill of Rights or the Protestant Succession...." Challis interrupted: "But the distant civility, this time?..."