ly-away reddish
moustache, was frankly delightful.--Damaris flushed, smiling to herself
now as she recalled his smile. Whereupon the humiliation of that thrice
wretched running away took a sharper edge. For she realized, poor child,
how much--notwithstanding her proud little snubbing of him--she coveted
his good opinion, wished him to admire and to like her; wanted, even
while she disapproved his self-complacency and slightly doubted his
truthfulness, to have him carry with him a happy impression of her--carry
it with him to that enchanted far Eastern land in which all the poetry of
her childhood had its root. For, if remembrance of her remained with him,
and that agreeably, she herself also found "Passage to India" in a sense.
And this idea, recondite though it was, touched and charmed her fancy--or
would have done so but for the recollection of her deplorable
flight.--Oh! what--what made her run away? From what had she thus run? If
she could only find out! And find, moreover, the cause sufficient to
palliate, to some extent at least, the woefulness of her cowardice.

But at this point her meditation suffered interruption. The three
cormorants, having finished their sun-bath, rose from the sand and
flapped off, flying low and sullenly in single file over the sea parallel
with the eastward-trending coast-line.

With the departure of the great birds her surroundings seemed to lose
their only element of active and conscious life. The brooding sunlit
evening became oppressive, so that in the space of a moment Damaris
passed from solitude, which is stimulating, to loneliness, which is only
sad. Meanwhile the shadow cast by the ilex trees had grown sensibly
longer, softer in outline, more transparent and finely intangible in
tone, and the reek of the mud-flats more potent, according to its habit
at sundown and low tide.

It quenched the garden scents with a fetid sweetness, symbolic perhaps of
the languorous sheltered character of the scene and of much which had or
might yet happen there--the life breath of the _genius loci_, an at once
seductive and, as Tom Verity had rightly divined, a doubtfully wholesome
spirit! Over Damaris it exercised an unwilling fascination, as of some
haunting refrain ending each verse of her personal experience. Even when,
as a little girl of eight, fresh from the gentle restraints and rare
religious and social amenities of an aristocratic convent school in
Paris, she had first encountered it, i