The twins had been at home, in a state of total eclipse for two days of ominous parental silence. Mr. Challoner, as usual, was busy; Helen was busy also, for after her absence there was more than enough at present to occupy her day. But she had not yet broached the subject that was at the root of the silence: until the skies cleared a little she felt absolutely unable to do so. Her father also had said nothing about it; they ate, they drank, the weather was mentioned, and the danger of trouble in the East. Mr. Challoner himself, except when he read prayers, had hardly said half a dozen words in Helen’s presence: it was “good-night” and “good-morning,” and both were bad. Martin also was, so to speak, in prison, though not, like his sister, in the condemned cell. He read Demosthenes in his father’s study while the latter was writing his sermon, fell asleep and was detected, awoke, and wrote a futile supererogatory set of Greek iambics containing several false quantities and forms of aorists previously unknown and very interesting.
This morning Helen had received a letter from Frank that troubled her, for he pressed, where he had only hinted before, for some definite sort of date. Reasonably enough, he saw no cause for delay; he knew that in spite of her father’s feelings she had accepted his devotion; that was all her’s, waiting for her to reward it. The tone was not querulous. If it had been, the letter she must write would have been less difficult. It was simply and sincerely trustful. But before she wrote she must talk to her father; that could be put off no longer.
For the moment, however, the “sad mechanic exercise” of the accounts occupied her attention. But, though the superficial brain which was employed on addition had its work before it, all that was round her—the walls, the floor, the aspect of the room, the neat, new brown-holland covers of the library—took that part of her brain that really felt and lived back to the day when she sat there last. The map of geological strata was there, too, with its auriferous belt, and she remembered very well Frank’s words about that: “There is a gold-bearing vein in all we are set to do. The trouble is to find it.” Yes, indeed, that was the trouble. She did not rebel against the superfluous ninepence, except, indeed, humorously; but what seemed to her such hard and barren rock was the living in this hopeless silence. Her conscience, her whole sense of moral obligation, had accepted the principle indicated to her by the dear aunt—sofa-cushion no longer—of this wider self-completion to be attained by behaving rightly in all relations of life. But at present she had been throwing good money after bad. The dutiful daughter had come home. No more notice was taken of her than of a mended window-pane.
Mr. Challoner always opened doors smartly. Thus, when the outer door of the “Room,” which gave on to a small lobby where wet coats were hung, gave a quick rattle of latch, she knew, with the same certainty as she had known the crisp foot on the gravel, who came.
“Have you finished the accounts?” he said.
“I can’t get them quite right, father,” she said. “I think—--“
“You have the bills and the receipts, have you not?” he said. “Where are they?”
Helen resented this, but silently; no shadow of it appeared in her face or voice.
“They are all here,” she said. “I have ninepence more than I should.”
Mr. Challoner sat down and counted up the silver and pence, arranging them in neat shilling heaps with all the care he would have given to a total of millions. Then rejecting her addition, he added up the receipted bills, and her mistake, one of pure carelessness, was patent.