rable to have outsiders
interfere and break up their delightful solitude _a trois_, their
delightful intercourse! Yet, almost immediately, the girl flushed, going
hot all over with shame, scolding herself for even passing entertainment
of such unworthy and selfish emotions.

"For it is Henrietta Pereira," she said half aloud. "My own darling,
long-ago Henrietta, who used to be so beautifully kind to me and give me
presents I loved above everything."

And, after a pause, the note of alarm sounding again though modified to
wistfulness--

"Will she care for me still, and shall I still care for her--but I must
care--I must--now I'm grown up?"

To set which disturbing questions finally at rest, being a valiant young
creature, Damaris permitted herself no second thoughts, no vacillation or
delay; but went straight downstairs and crossing the strip of terrace
garden, bare-headed as she was, waited at the head of the steps leading up
from the carriage drive to greet the idol of her guileless infancy.

To Colonel Carteret who, bringing up the rear of the little procession
was the first to notice her advent, she made a touching and gallant
picture. Her face had gone very pale and he saw, or fancied he saw, her
lips tremble. But her solemn eyes shone with a steady light, and,
whatever the excitement affecting her, she held it bravely in check.
Noting all which he could not but speculate as to whether she had any
knowledge of a certain romantic attachment--culminating on the one hand
in an act of virtuous treachery, on the other in an act of
renunciation--which had overshadowed and wrenched from its natural
sequence so large a portion of her father's life. He earnestly hoped she
was ignorant of all that; although the act of renunciation, made for her,
Damaris' sake, represented a magnificent gesture if an exaggerated and
almost fanatical one, on Charles Verity's part. It gave the measure of
the man's fortitude, the measure of his paternal devotion. Still
knowledge of it might, only too readily, prove a heavy burden to a young
girl's imaginative and tender conscience. Yes--he hoped she had been
spared that knowledge.

If she had escaped it thus far--as he reflected not without
amusement--the other actor in that rather tragic drama, now so
unexpectedly and arrestingly present in the flesh, could be trusted not
to enlighten her. He knew Henrietta Pereira of old, bless her hard little
heart. Not only did she detest tragedy, but