through and through. Only I can't speak of it. I
oughtn't just to leave it. To leave it would be wrong--wrong by you."

"Very well, my darling, ask me then," he said, a little hoarsely.

"You have heard about my being out on the Bar and--and all that?"

"Yes," he said, "I have heard."

"Captain Faircloth, who found me and brought me home, told me something."

Damaris' voice broke into tones of imploring tenderness.

"I love you, Commissioner Sahib, you know how I love you--but--but is
what Captain Faircloth told me true?"

Whereupon temptation surged up anew, inviting, inciting Charles Verity
to lie--dressing up that lie in the cloak of most excellent charity, of
veritable duty towards Damaris' fine courage and her precious innocence.
And he hedged, keeping open, if only for a few minutes longer, the way
of escape.

"How can I answer until I know what he did tell you?" he took her up, at
last, almost coldly.

"That he is your son--is my brother," Damaris said.

Even at this pass, Charles Verity waited before finally committing
himself, thereby unwittingly giving sentiment--in the shape of the
Powers of the Air--the chance to take a rather unfairly extensive hand
in the game.

For while he thus waited, he could not but be aware, through the tense
silence otherwise reigning in the room, of the tap and scratch of the
rose-spray upon the window-panes; of the swish of the moist gusty wind
sweeping from across the salt-marsh and mud-flats of the Haven--from the
black cottages, too, beyond the warren, gathered, as somewhat sinister
boon companions, about the bleak, grey stone-built Inn. And this served
to transfix his consciousness with visions of what once had been--he
knowing so exactly how it would all sound, all look out there, the
wistful desolation, the penetrating appeal bred of the inherent sadness
of the place on a wild autumn night such as this.

"Yes," he said at last, and putting a great constraint upon himself he
spoke calmly, without sign of emotion. "What the young man told is true,
Damaris, perfectly true."

"I--I thought so," she answered back, gravely. "Though I didn't
understand"--And, after a moment's pause, with a certain hopelessness of
resignation--"Though I don't understand even now."

In her utterance Charles Verity so distinctly heard the last words of
the--to him--dying child, that, smitten with raging bitterness of grief
and of regret, he said:

"Nevertheless it is, in my opinion,