rtion if you like! It's ugly--I won't have it, for
it is not true."

In the obvious sincerity of which denunciation Carteret found balm; yet
adhered to his purpose.

"But it is true, alas; and I therefore repeat it both for your admonition
and my own. For an elderly gentleman trotting at a young girl's heels is
a most unedifying spectacle--giving occasion, and reasonably, to the
enemy to blaspheme--bad for her in numberless ways; and, if he's any
remnant of self-respect left in him, is anything better than a fatuous
dotard, damnably bad for him as well. Do you understand?"

Damaris presented a mutinous countenance. She would have had much ado to
explain her own motives during this ten minutes' conference. If her
mental--or were they not rather mainly emotional?--turnings and doublings
proved baffling to her companion, they proved baffling to herself in an
almost greater degree. Things in general seemed to have gone into the
melting-pot. So many events had taken place, so many more been
preshadowed, so many strains of feeling excited! And these were
confusingly unrelated, or appeared to be so as yet. Amongst the confusion
of them she found no sure foothold, still less any highway along which to
travel in confidence and security. Her thought ran wild. Her intentions
ran with it, changing their colour chameleon-like from minute to minute.
Now she was tempted to make an equivocal rejoinder.

"To understand," she said, "is not always, Colonel Sahib, necessarily
to agree."

"I am satisfied with understanding and don't press for agreement," he
answered, and on an easier note--"since to me it is glaringly evident
you should take this fine flight unhandicapped. My duty is to stand
aside and leave you absolutely free--not because I enjoy standing aside,
but"--he would allow sentiment such meagre indulgence--"just exactly
because I do not."

Here for the second time, at the crucial moment, Felicia Verity made
irruption upon the scene. But though her entrance was hurried, it
differed fundamentally from that earlier one; so that both the man and
the girl, standing in the proximity of their intimate colloquy before the
fire, were sensible of and arrested by it. She was self-forgetful,
self-possessed, the exalted touch of a pure devotion upon her.

"I have been with my brother Charles," she began, addressing them both.
"I happened to see Hordle coming from the library--and I put off dinner.
I thought, darling"--this to Damaris