At first almost unconsciously, for by instinct
she was truthful, she embroidered fact, magnifying her office not only in
respect of her ex-pupil Damaris but of Damaris' father also. She
represented herself as indispensable to both parent and child, until she
more than half believed that flattering fiction. She began to reckon
herself an essential element in the establishment at The Hard, the pivot
indeed upon which it turned. Whereupon a rather morbid craving for the
Miss Minetts' society developed in her. For, with those two credulous
ladies as audience, she could fortify herself in delusion by recounting
all manner of episodes and incidents not as they actually had, but as she
so ardently desired they might have, taken place.--A pathetic form of
lying this, though far from uncommon to feminine and--more
especially--spinster practice and habit!

Still Theresa was not so besotted but that lucid intervals now and again
afflicted her. One seized her this afternoon, as she prepared to bid
Damaris good-bye. Either conscience pricked with unusual sharpness, or
the young girl's smiling and unruffled acquiescence in her departure
aroused latent alarms. She began to excuse her action in leaving her
charge thus solitary, to protest her devotion; becoming, it may be added,
red and agitated in the process. Her thick, short little fingers worked
nervously on the crook handle of her white cotton umbrella. Her round
light-coloured eyes grew humid to the point of fogging the lenses of her
gold-rimmed glasses.

"But why should you worry so now, just as you are starting, Billy?"
Damaris reasoned, with the rather cruel logic of cool eighteen in face of
hot and flustered nine-and-thirty. "Only at luncheon you were telling me
how much you always enjoy spending an afternoon at the Grey House. I
thought you looked forward so much to going. What has happened to turn
you all different, like this, at the last minute?"

"Nothing has happened exactly; but I have scruples about visiting my
own friends and letting you remain alone when Sir Charles is from home.
It might appear a dereliction of duty--as though I took advantage of
his absence."

"Nobody would think anything so foolish," Damaris declared. "And then you
knew he would be away this week when you made the engagement."

Theresa gulped and prevaricated.

"No, surely not--I must have mistaken the date."

"But you were quite happy at luncheon, and you couldn't have mistaken the
date t