initiated, still more
fully established,--a thing which, as each knew, could be best done
without witnesses; a thing which both intended should very surely be
done, yet concerning which neither proposed to speak until the hour of
accomplishment actually struck.

That hour, in point of fact, struck sooner than Damaris anticipated, the
sound and sight of it reaching her without prelude or opportunity of
preparation. For early in the afternoon of the second day she spent
downstairs, as, sitting at the writing table in the long drawing-room,
she raised her eyes from contemplation of the house-keeping books spread
out before her, she saw her father walking slowly up from the sea-wall
across the lawn. And seeing him, for the moment, her mind carried back to
that miracle of interchangeable personalities so distressingly haunting
her at the beginning of her illness, when James Colthurst's charcoal
sketch of her father played cruel juggler's tricks upon her. For beside
him now walked a man so strangely resembling him in height, in bearing
and in build that, but for the difference of clothing and the bearded
face, it might be himself had the clock of his life been set back by
thirty years.

Damaris' first instinct was of flight. Just as when, out on the Bar with
her cousin, Tom Verity, now nearly a month ago, overcome by a foreboding
of far-reaching danger she had--to the subsequent bitter wounding of her
self-respect and pride--shown the white feather, ignominiously turned
tail and run away, was she tempted to run away now.

For it seemed too much. It came too close, laying rough hands not only
upon the deepest of her love and reverence for her father, but upon that
still mysterious depth of her own nature, namely her apprehension of
passion and of sex. A sacred shame, an awe as at the commission of some
covert act of impiety, overcame her as she looked at the two men walking,
side by side, across the moist vividly green carpet of turf in the chill
white sunshine, the plain of an uneasy grey sea behind them. She wanted
to hide herself, to close eyes and ears against further knowledge.
Yes--it came too close; and at the same time made her feel, as never
before, isolated and desolate--as though a great gulf yawned between her
and what she had always counted pre-eminently her own, most securely her
property because most beloved.

She had spoken valiantly on Faircloth's behalf, had generously acted as
his advocate; yet now, beh