nted
among the pillows--holding aside the dimity curtain and gazing
wonderingly yet contentedly in his face.

"Commissioner Sahib," she said, softly, "I didn't know you'd come back.
I've had horrid bad dreams and seemed to see you--many of you--walking
about. The room was full of you, you over and over again; but not like
yourself, frightening, not loving me, busy about something or somebody
else. I didn't at all enjoy that.--But I am awake now, aren't I? I
needn't be frightened any more; because you do love me, don't you--and
this really is you, your very ownself?"

She put up her face to be kissed. But he, in obedience to an humility
heretofore unfelt by and unknown to him, leaning sideways kissed the hand
holding aside the curtain rather than the proffered lips.

"Yes, my darling, very surely it is me," he said. "Any multiplication of
specimens is quite superfluous--a single example of the breed is enough,
conceivably more than enough."

But to his distress, while he spoke, he saw the content die out of
Damaris' expression and her eyes grow distended and startled. She glanced
oddly at the hand he had just kissed and then at him again.

"It seems to me something must have happened which I can't exactly
remember," she anxiously told him, sitting upright and leaving go the
curtain which slipped back into place shutting off the arm-chair and its
occupant. "Something real, I mean, not just bad dreams. I know I had to
ask you about it, and yet I didn't want to ask you."

Charles Verity rose from his place, slowly walked the length of the room;
and, presently returning, stood at the foot of the bed. Damaris still sat
upright, her hands clasped, her hair hanging in a cloud about her to
below the waist. The light was low and the shadow cast by the bed-curtain
covered her. But, through it, he could still distinguish the startled
anxiety of her great eyes as she pondered, trying to seize and hold some
memory which escaped her. And he felt sick at heart, assured it could be
but a matter of time before she remembered; convinced now, moreover, what
she would, to his shame and sorrow, remember in the end.

The purity in which he delighted, and to which he so frequently and
almost superstitiously had turned for refreshment and the safeguarding of
all the finest instincts of his own very complex nature, would, although
she remembered, remain essentially intact. But, even so, the surface of
it must be, as he apprehended, hencef