--hadn't it
intoxicated her baby senses?--pervading Henrietta's hair, her clothes,
her whole pretty person. Loved the tinkle of the bunch of trinkets
dangling from the long chain which reached below her waist. She had
feared disappointment. That, as she now perceived, was altogether
superfluous. Henrietta enthralled her eyes, enthralled her affection. She
longed to protect, to serve her, to stand between her and every rough
wind which blew, because she was so pretty, so extraordinarily and
completely civilized from head to foot.

No doubt in the generosity of her youthful inexperience Damaris
exaggerated the lady's personal charm. Yet the dozen years
intervening--since their last meeting--had, in truth, dealt mercifully
with the latter's good looks. A trifle pinched, a trifle faded she might
be, as compared with the Henrietta of twelve years ago; but immediately
such damage, such wear and tear of the fleshly garment, showed at its
least conspicuous. She negotiated the double encounter, as Carteret had
noted, with admirable sang-froid; but not, as to the first one in any
case, without considerably greater inward commotion than he gave her
credit for. She was in fact keyed up by it, excited, taken out of herself
to an unprecedented extent, her native optimism and egoism in singular
disarray. Yet thereby, through that very excitement, she recaptured for
the time being the physical loveliness of an earlier period. Beauty is
very much a matter of circulation; and the blood cantered, not to say
galloped, through Henrietta's veins.

The sight of Charles Verity did indeed put back the clock for her in
most astounding sort. Henrietta was no victim of impulse. Each of her
three marriages had been dictated by convenience, carefully thought out
and calculated. Over neither husband had she, for ever so brief a
period, lost her head. But over Charles Verity she had come perilously
near losing it--once. That, it is not too much to say, constituted the
greatest sensation, the greatest emotion of her experience. As a rule
the most trying and embarrassing part of encountering a former lover is
that you wonder what, under Heaven, induced you to like him so well?
Here the position was reversed, so that Henrietta wondered--with a
sickening little contraction of the heart--what, under Heaven, had
prevented her liking him much more, why, under Heaven, she ever let him
go? Of course, as things turned out, it was all for the best, since her
i