nsensibility made for righteousness, or anyhow for respectability--in
the opinion of the world the same, if not an even superior article. She
ought to congratulate herself, ought to feel thankful. Only just now she
didn't. On the contrary she was shaken--consciously and most
uncomfortably shaken to the very deepest of such depths as her shallow
soul could boast--sitting here, on a buff-painted chair in the shade of
the pines and ilex trees, in company with Damaris, holding the girl's
hand in both her own with a clinging, slightly insistent, pressure as it
rested upon her lap.

"Dearest child, I believe, though you have grown so tall, I should have
recognized you anywhere," she said.

"And I you," Damaris echoed. "I did, I did, after just the first
little minute."

"Ah! you've a memory for faces too?"

Her glance wandered to the group of men gathered before the hotel
portico--Sir Charles and General Frayling side by side, engaged in civil
if not particularly animated conversation. The two voices reached her
with a singular difference of timbre and of tone. Carteret spoke,
apparently making some proposition, some invitation, in response to which
the four passed into the house.

Henrietta settled herself in her chair with a movement of sensible
relief. While they remained there she must look, and it was not quite
healthy to look.--Her good, little, old General, who only asked
respectfully to adore and follow in her wake--a man of few demands and
quite tidy fortune--and after poor, besotted, blustering, gambling,
squashily sentimental and tearful Johnnie Pereira wasn't he a haven of
rest--oh, positively a haven of rest? All the same she preferred his
not standing there in juxtaposition to Charles Verity. She much
preferred their all going indoors--Carteret along with the rest, if it
came to that.

She turned and smiled upon Damaris.

"However good your memory for faces may be, I find it very sweet you
should have recognized mine after 'just the first little minute,'" she
said, with a coaxing touch of mimicry. "You haven't quite parted company
with the baby I remember so well, even yet. I used to call you my downy
owl, with solemn saucer eyes and fierce little beak. You were
extraordinarily, really perplexingly like your father then. A miniature
edition, but so faithful to the original it used, sometimes, to give me
the quaintest jump."

Henrietta mused, raising one hand and fingering the lace at her throat
as see