ilken sunlight,
greeted him at the staircase foot, and an alarming disposition finally to
fling away head-cloth and winding-sheet when she petulantly broke in upon
Miss Verity's faded memories of Canton Magna with the flattering
assertion that time had run backward with him of late.

Now alone with her, confident, moreover, of her maidenly doubts
and pretty self-distrust, he felt at a decided disadvantage. The
detached, affectionately friendly, the avuncular--not to say
grandfatherly--attitude escaped him. He could not play that part.

"Oh! you exaggerate difficulties," he therefore told her, with a
singular absence of his habitual mansuetude, his tone trenching on
impatience. "Instinct and common sense will teach you-mother-wit, too-of
which, you may take it from me, you have enough and to spare.-Let alone
that there will be a host of people emulous of guiding your steps aright,
if your steps should stand in need of guidance which I venture to doubt.
Don't underrate your own cleverness." Hearing him, sensible of his
apparent impatience and misconceiving the cause of it, Damaris' temper
stirred. She felt vexed. She also felt injured.

"What has happened to you, Colonel Sahib?" she asked him squarely. "I
see nothing foolish in what I have said. You wouldn't have me so
conceited that I rushed into this immense business without a qualm,
without any thought whether I can carry it out creditably--with credit
to him, I mean?"

Thus astonishingly attacked, Carteret hedged.

"Miss Verity, of course, will be"--he began.

Damaris cut him short.

"Aunt Felicia is an angel, a darling," she declared, "but--but"--

And there stopped, pricked by a guilty conscience. For to expose Miss
Felicia's inadequacies and enlarge on her ineligibility for the position
of feminine Chief of the Staff, struck her as unworthy, a meanness to
which, under existing circumstances, she could not condescend to stoop.

Carteret looked up, to be entranced not only by the fair spectacle of
her youth but by her delicious little air of shame and self-reproach.
Evidently she had caught herself out in some small naughtiness--was both
penitent and defiant, at once admitting her fault and pleading for
indulgence. He suspected some thought at the back of her mind which he
could neither exactly seize nor place. She baffled him with her changes
of mood and of direction--coming close and then slipping from under his
hand. This humour was