which intimate memories, Damaris' grave voice--which had
taken on a chanting cadence, at once novel and singularly pleasing to the
young man's ear--quavered and broke.

"Poor little exiled princess!" he cried, all his facile kindness to the
fore again. "Yes, it must have been cruelly hard on you. You must have
suffered. No wonder you cried--cried buckets full."

And drawn by pity for that desolate, tropic-bred little child, Tom got on
to his feet and crunched up the loose shingle to the crest of the ridge,
full of a lively desire to pacify and console. But here the soft breeze
met and caressed him, and the whole plain of the tranquil sea came into
view--turquoise shot with pearl, as Damaris recently figured it, and
fringed with topaz where waves, a few inches high and clear as glass,
broke on the yellow sand at the back of the Bar just below.

"How wonderfully lovely!" he exclaimed, carried out of himself by the
extreme fairness of the scene. And, his hands in his trouser pockets he
stood staring, while once again the pull of home, of England, of
tenderness for all that which he was about to leave, dimmed his eyes and
raised a lump in his throat.

"Upon my word, you must be difficult to please if this place doesn't
please you or come up to your requirements, Damaris," he said, presently
sitting down beside her. "No Arabian Nights palace in Asia, I grant you;
yet in its own humbler and--dare I say?--less showy, manner not easy to
beat. Breathe this enchanting air. See the heavenly tints with which our
good dirty useful old Channel has adorned itself. Can you ask for more,
you insatiable person, in the way of beauty?"

Then, slightly ashamed of his outburst, Tom practised a delightful smile,
at once sentimental and flirtatious.

"No, on second thoughts, my dear princess, I keep my commiseration for my
wretched self--every crumb of it. For I am the lonely exile--that is, I
am just about to be--not you. Be advised, don't quarrel with the good
gifts of the gods. Deadham Hard is frankly entrancing. How willingly
would I put off taking ship for your vaunted India, and spend the
unending cycles of eternity here--with you, well understood--in this most
delectable spot instead."

Whereupon Damaris, with mingled gravity and haste, her head bent, so
that hat-crown and hat-brim were presented to the young man's observation
rather than her face, proceeded to explain she had spoken not of the
present but of the past. From the t