Both soup and fish had been achieved, however, before a word was spoken.  It was Stephen who, after taking a mouthful of dry sherry, broke the silence.

“How are you getting on with your book, sir?”

Cecilia heard that question with something like dismay.  It was so bald; for, however inconvenient Mr. Stone’s absorption in his manuscript might be, her delicacy told her how precious beyond life itself that book was to him.  To her relief, however, her father was eating spinach.

“You must be getting near the end, I should think,” proceeded Stephen.

Cecilia spoke hastily:  “Isn’t this white lilac lovely, Dad?”

Mr. Stone looked up.

“It is not white; it is really pink.  The test is simple.”  He paused with his eyes fixed on the lilac.

‘Ah!’ thought Cecilia, ’now, if I can only keep him on natural science he used to be so interesting.’

“All flowers are one!” said Mr. Stone.  His voice had changed.

‘Oh!’ thought Cecilia, ‘he is gone!’

“They have but a single soul.  In those days men divided, and subdivided them, oblivious of the one pale spirit which underlay those seemingly separate forms.”

Cecilia’s glance passed swiftly from the manservant to Stephen.

She saw one of her husband’s eyes rise visibly.  Stephen did so hate one thing to be confounded with another.

“Oh, come, sir,” she heard him say; “you don’t surely tell us that dandelions and roses have the same pale spirit!”

Mr. Stone looked at him wistfully.

“Did I say that?” he said.  “I had no wish to be dogmatic.”

“Not at all, sir, not at all,” murmured Stephen.

Thyme, leaning over to her mother, whispered “Oh, Mother, don’t let grandfather be queer; I can’t bear it to-night!”

Cecilia, at her wits’ end, said hurriedly: 

“Dad, will you tell us what sort of character you think that little girl who comes to you has?”

Mr. Stone paused in the act of drinking water; his attention had evidently been riveted; he did not, however, speak.  And Cecilia, seeing that the butler, out of the perversity which she found so conspicuous in her servants, was about to hand him beef, made a desperate movement with her lips.  “No, Charles, not there, not there!”

The butler, tightening his lips, passed on.  Mr. Stone spoke: 

“I had not considered that.  She is rather of a Celtic than an Anglo-Saxon type; the cheekbones are prominent; the jaw is not massive; the head is broad—­if I can remember I will measure it; the eyes are of a peculiar blue, resembling chicory flowers; the mouth—–­,” Mr. Stone paused.

Cecilia thought:  ’What a lucky find!  Now perhaps he will go on all right!’

“I do not know,” Mr. Stone resumed, speaking in a far-off voice, “whether she would be virtuous.”

Cecilia heard Stephen drinking sherry; Thyme, too, was drinking something; she herself drank nothing, but, pink and quiet, for she was a well-bred woman, said: