awn.--Oh! if
only her poor dear Nannie were still alive, safe upstairs, there in the
old nursery!

And at that the child Damaris felt a lump rise in her throat. But the
girl, the soon-to-be woman, Damaris choked it down bravely. For nobody,
nothing--so she assured herself, going back to the lesson learned
yesterday upon the open moorland--is really inevitable unless you suffer
or will it so to be. Wherefore she stiffened herself against recognition
of loneliness, stiffened herself against inclination to mourning, refused
to acquiesce in or be subjugated by either and, to the better forgetting
of them, sought consolation among her great-great uncle's books.

For at this period Damaris was an omnivorous reader, eager for every form
of literature and every description of knowledge--whether clearly
comprehended or not--which the beloved printed page has to give. An
eagerness, it may be noted, not infrequently productive of collisions
with Theresa, and at this particular juncture all the more agreeable to
gratify on that very account. For Theresa would have had her walk only in
the narrow, sheltered, neatly bordered paths of history and fiction
designed, for the greater preservation of female innocence, by such
authors as Miss Sewell, Miss Strickland, and Miss Yonge. Upon Damaris,
however, perambulation of those paths palled too soon. Her intellect and
heart alike demanded wider fields of drama, of religion and of science,
above all wider and less conventional converse with average human nature,
than this triumvirate of Victorian sibyls was willing or capable to
supply. It is undeniable that, although words and phrases, whole episodes
indeed, were obscure even unintelligible to her, she found the memoirs of
Benvenuto Cellini and Saint Simon more interesting than the "Lives of the
Queens of England; Vathek," more to her taste than "Amy Herbert"; and,
if the truth must be told, "The Decameron," and "Tristram Shandy" more
satisfying to her imagination than "The Heir of Redcliffe" or "The Daisy
Chain." To Damaris it seemed, just now, that a book the meaning of which
was quite clear to her and could be grasped at sight, hardly repaid the
trouble of reading, since it afforded no sense of adventure, no
excitement of challenge or of pursuit, no mirage of wonder, no delightful
provocation of matters outside her experience and not understood. About
these latter she abstained from asking questions, having much faith in
the illuminatin