n the bare polished floor, while the wind murmured
through the spreading pines, shading the terrace below, and gently fanned
her throat and temples.

For Faircloth's letter seemed to her very wonderful, alike in its vigour,
its simplicity and--her lips quivered--its revelation of loving.--How he
cared--and how he went on caring!--There were coarse words in it, the
meaning of which she neither knew nor sought to know; but she did not
resent them. The letter indeed would have lost some of its living force,
its convincing reality, had they been omitted. They rang true, to her
ear. And just because they rang true the rest rang blessedly true as
well. She gloried in the whole therefore, breathing through it a larger
air of faith and hope, and confident fortitude. The kindred qualities of
her own heart and intelligence, the flush of her fine enthusiasm, sprang
to meet and join with the fineness of it, its richness of promise and of
good omen.

For a time mind and emotion remained thus in stable and exalted
equilibrium. Then, as enchantment reached its necessary term and her
apprehensions and thought began to work more normally, she badly wanted
someone to speak to. She wanted to bear witness, to testify, to pour
forth both the moving tale and her own sensations, into the ear of some
indulgent and friendly listener. She--she--wanted to tell Colonel
Carteret about it, to enlist his interest, to read him, in part at least,
Darcy Faircloth's letter, and hear his confirmation of the noble spirit
she discerned in it, its poetry, its charm. For the dear man with the
blue eyes would understand, of that she felt confident, understand
fully--and it would set her right with him, if, as she suspected, he was
not somehow quite pleased with her. She caressed the idea, while, so
doing, silence and concealment grew increasingly irksome to her. Oh! she
wanted to speak--and to her father she could not speak.

With that both Damaris' attitude and expression changed, the glory
abruptly departing. She got up off the floor, left the window, and sat
down very soberly, in a red-velvet covered arm-chair, placed before the
flat stone hearth piled with wood ashes.

There truly was the fly in the ointment, the abiding smirch on the
otherwise radiant surface--as she now hailed it--of this strangely moving
fraternal relation. The fact of it did come, and, as she feared, would
inevitably continue to come between her and her father, marring to an
apprec