elcome. To breathe it demanded exertion. So he said, chaffingly:

"Do I interfere with your thinking? I hope not. But if I offend that way,
speak but a word and I disappear like a shot."

"Oh! no," she answered. "How could you interfere? You are part of it. You
started it, you see, because you are going to India."

Whereat, failing to catch the sequence of ideas, male vanity plumed
itself, tickled to the point of amusement. For was not she a child after
all, transparently simple and candid, and very much a woman-child at
that! Tom turning on his side raised himself on one elbow, smiling at her
with easy good-nature.

"How charming of you to adopt me as a special object of thought, and care
so much about my going."

But patronage proved short-lived. The girl's colour deepened, but her
eyes dwelt on him coldly.

"I have only been thinking how fortunate you are, and seeing pictures in
my mind of what you will see which will be new to you--and--and
remembering."

"Oh! of course, I am lucky, tremendously lucky," he hastened to declare,
laughing a little wryly. "Such a journey is a liberal education in
itself, knocking the insularity out of a man--if he has any receptive
faculty that is--and ridding him of all manner of stodgy prejudices. I
don't the least undervalue my good fortune.--But you talk of remembering.
That's stretching a point surely. You must have been a mere baby, my dear
Damaris, when you left India."

"No, I was six years old, and I remember quite well. All my caring for
people, all my thinking, begins there, in the palace of the Sultan-i-bagh
at Bhutpur and the great compound, when my father was Chief
Commissioner."

Her snub duly delivered, and she secure it had gone home, Damaris unbent,
graciously communicative as never before.

"It was all so beautiful and safe there inside the high walls, and yet a
teeny bit frightening because you knew there were other things--as there
are to-day--which you felt but couldn't quite see all about you.
Sometimes they nearly pushed through--I was always expecting and I like
to expect. It hurt me dreadfully to go away; but I had been very ill.
They were afraid I should die and so Dr. McCabe--he was here when you
arrived yesterday--insisted on my being sent to Europe. A lady--Mrs.
Pereira--and my nurse Sarah Watson took me to Paris, to the convent
school where I was to be educated. It was all very strange, but the nuns
were kind. I liked their religion, and I got