ings obey him, just as you yourself do.
And," she went on, with a daring surely not a little magnificent under
the circumstances--"he told me he loved life too well to care very much
how he came by it to begin with."

Damaris folded her arms, let her head sink on them as she finished
speaking, and lay flat thus, her face hidden, while she breathed short
and raspingly, struggling to control the after violence of her emotion.

The curtain hung straight. The wind took up its desolate chant again. And
Sir Charles Verity sat back in the angle of the arm-chair, motionless,
and, for the present, speechless.

In truth he was greatly moved, stirred to the deep places of perception,
and of conscience also. For this death of childhood and birth of
womanhood undoubtedly presented a rare and telling spectacle, which, even
while it rent him, in some aspects enraged and mortified him, he still
appreciated. He found, indeed, a strangely vital, if somewhat cruel,
satisfaction in looking on at it--a satisfaction fed, on its more humane
and human side, by the testimony to the worth of the unknown son by the
so well-beloved daughter. Respecting himself he might have cause for
shame; but respecting these two beings for whose existence--whether born
in wedlock or out of it--he was responsible, he had no cause for shame.
In his first knowledge of them as seen together, they showed strong,
generous, sure of purpose, a glamour of high romance in their
adventitious meeting and companionship.

This was the first, the unworldly and perhaps deepest view of the matter.
In it Charles Verity allowed himself to rest, inactive for a space. That
there were, not one, but many other views of the said matter, very
differently attuned and coloured he was perfectly well aware. Soon these
would leap on him, and that with an ugly clamour which he consciously
turned from in repulsion and weary disgust. For he was very tired, as he
now realized. The anxiety endured during his tedious cross-country
journey, the distasteful tragic-comedy of the _scene de seduction_ so
artlessly made him by unlucky Theresa Bilsen, followed by this prolonged
vigil; lastly the very real tragedy--for such it in great measure
remained and must remain--of his interview with Damaris and the re-living
of long buried drama that interview entailed, left him mentally and
physically spent. He fell away into meditation, mournful as it was
indefinite, while the classic lament of another age a