y yet confidently
asserted. "You take the whole business topsy-turvy fashion, quite wrong
way round. I won't weary you with explanations of exactly what led to
Darcy Faircloth coming here with me on Sunday. But you ought to know that
he and Aunt Felicia met. I hadn't planned that. It just happened. And she
was lovely to him--lovely to us both. She made him stay to
luncheon--inviting him in your name."

"I seem to possess a singular gift for saddling my relations with the
payment of my bad debts," Charles Verity remarked.

"But there isn't any bad debt--that's what I so dearly want you to
believe, what I'm trying so hard, Commissioner Sahib, to tell you,"
Damaris cried. "Afterwards, when he and I were alone by ourselves, the
ice broke somehow, he gave himself away and said beautiful things--things
about you which made me delightfully happy, and showed how he has felt
towards you all along."

Simply, without picking of her words, hesitation or artifice, Damaris
repeated that somewhat sinister tale of the sea. Of a sailing ship,
becalmed through burning days and stifling nights in tropic waters. Of
the ill-doings of a brutal, drunken captain. Of a fly-blown eating-house
in Singapore. Of the spiritual deliverance there achieved through sight
of Charles Verity's name and successful record in the columns of a
Calcutta newspaper; and the boy's resultant demand for the infliction of
some outward and visible sign, some inalienable stigmata, which should
bear perpetual witness to the fact of his parentage.

"So you see"--

Damaris kindled, standing before him, flamed indeed to a rare
carelessness of convention, of enjoined pruderies and secrecies.--

"You gave him the beautiful gift of life to begin with; and saved his
life later when he was so miserably tempted to end it. As he loves life,
where then is the debt?--Not on your side certainly, dearest."

Listening to which fondly exalted sophistries--for sophistries from
worldly and moral standpoint alike must he not surely pronounce
them?--Charles Verity still received comfort to his soul. They ought to
be reckoned mistaken, of course, transparently in error, yet neither son
nor daughter condemned him. Neither did his sister, in the pathetic
innocence and purity of her middle-age maidenhood.

This moved him to thankfulness, none the less genuine because shot with
self-mockery. For he was curious to observe how, as the last urgings of
ambition and thirst of power fell awa