d you meant what you said. Not, I'm
afraid, that your giving your permission or withholding it would have
made much difference in the upshot. Timothy Proud let on, in my hearing,
that he set you across the river soon after two o'clock, and that there'd
been no call for the ferry since. So I took one of my own boats and just
came over to look for you--in case you might have met with some mishap or
strayed among the sand-hills and couldn't find your"--

Thus far he spoke with studied calm and restraint. But here, as though
struck by a fresh and very objectionable idea, he broke out:

"Nothing has happened has it? No cowardly brute has interfered with
you or upset you? Dear God alive, don't tell me I'm too late, don't
tell me that."

Upon Damaris this sudden, though to her unaccountable, violence and heat
acted as a cordial. She raised her head, pushing back the damp hair from
her forehead, and displaying a proud if strained and weary face.

"No," she said, "of course not. Who would venture to be rude to me? I
have not seen anyone all the afternoon--until now, when you came. And,"
she added by way of further explanation--she didn't want to be ungracious
or unkind, but she did want, in justice to herself, to have this
understood--"in the distance I didn't recognize you. I mistook you for
someone else"--

"Who else?" he took her up, and with a queer flicker--if of a smile, then
one with a keenish edge to it--in his eyes and about his mouth.

"For my father," Damaris answered. "It was a stupid mistake, because he
is away staying in Norfolk for partridge shooting, and I have not any
real reason to expect him home for several days yet."

"But in this deceptive light," Faircloth took her up again, while--as she
could not help observing--that flicker became more pronounced. It seemed
silently to laugh and to mock.--"Oh! to be sure that accounts for your
mistake as to my identity. One sees how it might very well come about."

He took off his cap, and threw back his head looking up into the
low wet sky.

"At night all cats are grey, aren't they," he went on, "little ones as
well as big? And it's close on night now, thanks to this dirty weather.
So close on it, that--though personally I'm in no hurry--I ought to get
you back to The Hard, or there'll be a regular hue and cry after
you--rightly and probably too, if your servants and people have any
notion of their duty."

"I am quite ready," Damaris said.

She strove to s