She had a vision of Eric Gwatkin; she had often seen him looking at Lucy in the college chapel, and she remembered that he had called to see her several times lately. Why hadn't Lucy told her of it before? 'Mr. Colville has asked me to marry him,' Lucy said humbly. The room didn't turn exactly upside down; if it had, all the books would have tumbled out of the shelves, and the old Worcester vases on the mantelpiece would have been broken to pieces, which would have been a thousand pities, and the furniture of the room would have been generally disarranged. Something happened--Mary Rae never exactly knew what; she was only conscious of a band tightening round her heart, and that when she tried to speak her voice sounded a long way off. 'Mr. Colville?' she repeated in her distant, faint voice. 'Yes,' Lucy said bashfully, as if it were the first time any man had asked her to marry him; 'but I have not given him an answer yet. What answer do you think I ought to give him?' Cousin Mary was not going to advise Lucy on this point. She knew what answer she had been prepared to give him the last twenty years. The Master of St. Benedict's came over to the lodge for his answer the next day. He hadn't been formally elected Master yet, but the matter was practically settled. He and Mary had been doing the Master's work together for years past. But it was not to see Mary he came to the lodge now; he asked to see Lucy, and she came to him in the gallery. Lucy knew exactly what he had come for, and she had his answer ready for him--quite ready. It had cost her something to make up her mind. She couldn't marry a man with gray hair--only iron-gray as yet--and with a bald spot on the crown, and with a big red throat, and bushy eyebrows, and a crop of wrinkles round his eyes, without a pang. She was only twenty--sweet and twenty--and her life was before her. Yes, it cost her a pang to accept the Senior Tutor. Perhaps it would have cost her more to reject him. He had a good deal to offer. Lucy did not lose sight of that in making up her mind. If she refused him she would have to toil through life as a governess--possibly a nursery governess. One cannot teach what one doesn't know, and a term's residence at Newnham had taught Lucy one thing: that she knew very little, and that that little was not worth much. Perhaps if she had passed her examinations with honour--had come out in the first class--she might have given the Senior Tutor a different answer. Immense possibilities would have opened before her. She might be Senior Wrangler, Senior Classic, Senior Theologian--oh no, women are never theologians; she might have been a first class in any Tripos, and by-and-by, when the way was made clear, she might take a high degree, and wear a scarlet hood, and--there will be such things--she might be a female Vice-Chancellor!