discretion!

"You require me to give you the details, Sir Charles," she resumed, "and
although it is both embarrassing and repugnant to me to do so, I obey. I
fear Damaris so far forgot herself--forgot I mean what is due to her age
and position--as to remove her shoes and stockings and paddle in the
sea--a most unsuitable and childish occupation. While she was thus
engaged her things--her shoes and stockings--appear to have been stolen.
In any case she was unable to find them when tired of the amusement she
came up on to the beach. Moreover she was caught in the rain. And I
deeply regret to tell you--but I merely repeat what I learned from Mary
Fisher and Mrs. Cooper when I returned--it was not till after dark, when
the maids had become so alarmed that they despatched Tolling and Alfred
to search for her, that Damaris landed from a boat at the breakwater,
having been brought down the river--by--by"--

Throughout the earlier portion of her recital Charles Verity stood in the
same place and same attitude staring down at the tiger skin. Twice or
thrice only he raised his eyes, looking at the speaker with a flash of
arrogant interrogation.

Upon one, even but moderately, versed in the secular arts of twig-liming,
such flashes would have acted as an effective warning and deterrent. Not
so upon Theresa. She barely noticed them, as blindly heroic, she pounded
along leading her piteous forlorn hope. Her chance--her unique chance, in
nowise to be missed--and, still more, those obscure hungers, fed by the
excitement of this midnight _tete-a-tete,_ rushed her forward upon the
abyss; while at every sputtering sentence, whether of adulation,
misplaced prudery, or thinly veiled animosity towards Damaris, she became
more tedious, more frankly intolerable and ridiculous to him whose favour
she so desperately sought. Under less anxious circumstances Charles
Verity might have been contemptuously amused at this exhibition of futile
ardour. Now it exasperated him. Yet he waited, in rather cruel patience.
Presently he would demolish her, if to do so appeared worth the trouble.
Meanwhile she should have her say, since incidentally he might learn
something from it bearing upon the cause of Damaris' illness.

But now, when, at the climax of her narrative, Theresa--seized by a spasm
of retrospective resentment and jealousy, the picture of the young man
carrying the girl tenderly in his arms across the dusky lawns arising
before her--choked a