ended abruptly in a hard straight line--the land cut off sheer, as
it seemed, at the outer edge of a gravelled terrace, upon which two small
antiquated cannon were mounted, their rusty muzzles trained over swirling
blue-green tide river and yellow-grey, high-cambered sand-bar out to sea.

Between these innocuous engines of destruction, little black cannon balls
had been piled into a mimic pyramid, near to which three men stood
engaged in desultory conversation. One of them, Tom observed as markedly
taller, more commanding and distinguished in bearing, than his
companions. Even from here, the whole length of the lawn intervening,
his presence, once noted, became of arresting importance, focussing
attention as the central interest, the one thing which vitally mattered
in this gracious scene--his figure silhouetted, vertically, against those
long horizontal lines of river, sand-bar, and far-away delicate junction
of opal-tinted sea with opal-tinted sky.

Whereupon Tom became convicted of the agreeable certainty that no
disappointment awaited him. His expectations were about to receive
generous fulfilment. This visit would prove well worth while. So
absorbed, indeed, was he in watching the man whom he supposed--and
rightly--to be his host, that he failed to notice one of the ladies rise
from the tea-table and advance across the lawn, until her youthful
white-clad form was close upon him, threading its way between the glowing
geranium beds.

Then--"You are my cousin, Thomas Verity?" the girl asked, with a grave
air of ceremony.

"Yes--and you--you are my cousin Damaris," he answered as he felt
clumsily, being taken unaware in more respects than one, and, for all his
ready adaptability, being unable to keep a note of surprise out of his
voice and glance.

He had known of the existence of this little cousin, having heard--on
occasion--vaguely irritated family mention of her birth at a time when
the flame of the Mutiny still burned fiercely in the Punjab and in Oudh.
To be born under such very accentuated circumstances could, in the eyes
of every normal Verity, hardly fail to argue a certain obtrusiveness and
absence of good taste. He had heard, moreover, disapproving allusions to
the extravagant affection Sir Charles Verity was said to lavish upon this
fruit of a somewhat obscure marriage--his only surviving child. But the
said family talk, in Tom's case, had gone in at one ear and out at the
other--as the talk of the eld