A maid-servant with a message from the vicar roused her. Would she please to come into his study for a moment. She got up with a vague, dreadful sense that this had all happened before, but she could not remember the outcome, and as she walked across the lawn the terrible, impossible pictures again flashed through her head, like scenes of a magic-lantern staring out of blackness. The aroma of tobacco as she opened the study door gave her a sudden, shallow thrill of comfort. But this was scarcely endorsed by the next impression. Mr. Challoner, always courteous, had no doubt suggested one of his excellent cigars, and Frank had accepted it. But the good-fellowship tacitly implied by the act was here omitted. The vicar stood with his back to the fireplace, flinty-faced; Frank sat in a big chair drawn close to the writing-table, the chair in which times without number Helen and Martin had sat together looking at Bible pictures after tea on Sunday. All the furniture of the study, the aromatic smell of leather bindings that hung there, the uncompromising tidiness of it, its orderly severity, the picture of the Roman forum, the glass paper-weight on the table, brought a sudden rush of associations into the girl’s mind now that she saw Frank there too; they were all so closely knit into the fabric of her life, so intimately suggestive of that stern, tall figure by the fireplace. And somewhere far away back in her brain her own voice, in a little childish pipe, whispered to Martin, “Papa’s cross about something. Is it you or me?” She took a seat in silence, and the silence lengthened ominously. Frank was looking at her with a quiet, level gaze, full of love and full of pity, and she turned her eyes away, fearing that she would scream with tears or laughter if she allowed herself to look at him. And the voice that broke the silence was quiet and level also; the whole thing was deplorably well-bred. Insults, violence, all that she had pictured to herself, would have been a relief, a safety-valve for the bursting pressure that she knew existed beneath. But as yet there was none. “I have sent for you, Helen,” said her father, “to choose.” He paused a moment. “Lord Yorkshire is on the one side,” he said, “I am on the other. We have settled it so.” “That is not quite fairly stated,” said Frank, in the tone a man might use if he demurred to some argument in a discussion in which he was not really interested. Mr. Challoner’s face grew a shade paler. “Did you say ‘fairly’?” he asked. The deadly quietness of this suddenly frightened the girl. That was a tone in his voice she knew and dreaded. “Father,” she said, “father.” They neither of them took any notice of her, and Frank answered in the same gentle, objecting manner. “You say ‘we settled it,’” he said. “I had nothing to do with it. You merely told me what you were going to do. That is why I used the word ‘fairly.’” Mr. Challoner considered this for a moment.