features slightly losing their accentuation, growing youthful, softer in
outline, the long drooping moustache giving place to a close-cut beard.
The eyes alone stayed the same, steady, luminous, a living silence in
them at once formidable and strangely sad. Finally--and this the poor
child found indescribably agitating and even horrible--their silence was
broken by a question. For they asked what she, Damaris, meant to say,
meant to do, when he--her father, the all-powerful Commissioner Sahib of
her babyhood's faith and devotion--came home here, came back?

Yet whose eyes, after all, were they which thus asked? Was it not, rather
the younger man, the bearded one, who claimed, and of right, an answer to
that question? And upon Damaris it now dawned that these two, distinct
yet interchangeable personalities--imprisoned, as by some evil magic in
one picture--were in opposition, in violent and impious conflict, which
conflict she was called upon, yet was powerless, to avert or to assuage.

Not once but many times--since the transformation was persistently
recurrent--the girl turned her face to the wall to gain relief from the
sight of it and the demand it so fearfully embodied, pressing her dry
lips together lest any word should escape them. For the whole matter, as
she understood it was secret, sacred too as it was agonizing. No one must
guess what lay at the root of her present suffering--not even comfortable
devoted Mary, nor that invaluable lifebelt, Dr. McCabe. She held the
honour of both those conflicting interchangeable personalities in her
hands; and, whether she were strong enough to adjust their differences or
not, she must in no wise betray either of them. The latent motherhood in
her cried out to protect and to shield them both, to spare them both. For
in this stage of the affair, while the hallucinations of deadly fever--in
a sense mercifully--confused her, its grosser aspects did not present
themselves to her mind. She wandered through mazes, painful enough to
tread; but far removed from the ugliness of vulgar scandal. That her
sacred secret, for instance, might be no more than a _secret de
Polichinelle_ suspected by many, did not, so far, occur to her.

Believing it to be her exclusive property, therefore, she, inspired by
tender cunning, strove manfully to keep it so. To that end she made play
with the purely physical miseries of her indisposition.--With shivering
fits and scorching flushes, cold aching limb