ead loose across the pillows. He had no wish for
recognition--not yet awhile. On the contrary, it was a relief to have
time in which silently to get accustomed to her presence, to steep
himself in the thought of her, before speech should define the new
element intruded, as he believed, into his and her relation. Though
little enough--too little, so said some of his critics--hampered by
fear in any department, he consciously dreaded the smallest
modification of that relation. Among the many dissatisfactions and
bitternesses of life, it shone forth with a steady light of purity and
sweetness, as a thing unspoiled, unbreathed on, even, by what is
ignoble or base. And not the surface of it alone was thus free from all
breath of defilement. It showed clear right through, as some gem of the
purest water. To keep it thus inviolate, he had made sacrifices in the
past neither easy nor inconsiderable to a man of his temperament and
ambitions. Hence that its perfection should be now endangered was to
him the more exquisitely hateful.

Upon the altar of that hatred, promptly without scruple he sacrificed
the wretched Theresa. Most of us are so constituted that, at a certain
pass, pleasure--of a sort--is to be derived from witnessing the anguish
of a fellow creature. In all save the grossly degenerate that pleasure,
however, is short-lived. Reflection follows, in which we cut to ourselves
but a sorry figure. With Charles Verity, reflection began to follow
before he had spent many minutes in Damaris' sick-room. For here the
atmosphere was, at once, grave and tender, beautifully honest in its
innocence of the things of the flesh.--The woman had been inconceivably
foolish, from every point of view. If she had known, good heavens, if she
had only known! But he inclined now to the more merciful view that,
veritably, she didn't know; that her practical, even her theoretic,
knowledge was insufficient for her to have had any clear design. It was
just a blind push of starved animal instinct. Of course she must go. Her
remaining in the house was in every way unpermissible; still he need not,
perhaps, have been so cold-bloodedly precipitate with her.

Anyhow the thing was done--it was done--He raised his shoulders and
making with his hands a graphic gesture of dismissal, let his chin drop
on to his breast again.

For the East had left its mark on his attitude towards women with one
exception--that of his daughter--Charles Verity, like most m