This was a little clumsily obvious, and it made her for the moment slightly embarrassed. She dabbed a label somewhat crooked on to the back of a work about missionary enterprise. “Can you write a legible hand, Lord Yorkshire?” she said. “If so, and if you will be kind enough, please write ‘Sunday Magazine’ very clearly on twelve labels, with ordinal numbers, one to twelve, below the title. And when I’ve pasted them on, I shall have finished, and we’ll go out. Martin isn’t here, I am afraid. He is up at Cambridge till the end of the month.” Frank obediently took a pen. He had suffered a slight repulse. “A notable charm of life,” he remarked, “is its extreme unexpectedness. If I had been told by a chiromantist that I should shortly be writing the words ‘Sunday Magazine’--is that legible enough?--twelve times over with numerals beneath I should have distrusted everything else he said. Yet, here we go.” Helen laughed. She was not quite certain whether she was pleased or not at the success with which she had turned the conversation on to topics so alien from herself as the “Sunday Magazine.” “Quite so,” she said. “And if I had been told that I should be telling you to do so, I should have considered it too wildly improbable to be even funny. Yet, as you say, here we go. Oh!” Her ear had caught the sound of a step outside, and with a quick sweep of her arm she threw her cigarette out of the window. “It’s you, remember,” she said, with whispered emphasis. Frank’s cigarette, however, was still unlit, but he obligingly remedied this, and hurriedly blew out a cloud of smoke and silent laughter. Next moment the vicar entered. He paused for a second on the threshold, his nostrils surprised by this unusual aroma in the Room, but Frank instantly rose. “How are you, Mr. Challoner?” he said. “I called at the vicarage, but every one was out. But hopes were held out to me that I might find some of you here, so I came. And behold me,” he added, rather felicitously, “a lay helper,” and he pointed to his half-written labels. The vicar’s somewhat grim face relaxed. There was a neatness about Frank’s speech which his classical tastes approved. “It is too kind of you, Lord Yorkshire,” he said. “Helen has impressed you into the service, I suppose. But--I am sure you will excuse me--would you mind finishing your cigarette outside? Our rules about smoking in the Room are stringent. You will excuse me.” His eye glanced rather sternly, as he spoke, at Helen. This was one of the laxities he deplored in his children. She knew quite well that smoking was not allowed in the Room. The most infinitesimal moral courage on her part could have stopped it. And he himself knew how she would excuse herself, saying that she did not think it mattered in the morning when there was no one there. It was a rule of the place, however. He had made it; she knew it. Frank instantly threw his cigarette out of the window.