nder his breath, slowly, gently but most comprehensively, Carteret
swore. And felt all the better for that impious exercise, even amused at
this primitive expression of his moral and sentimental disturbance, and
so on the high-road, as he fondly imagined, to capture his habitual
attitude of charity and tolerance once again. But heaven had further
trial of his fortitude and magnanimity, not to say his good honest horse
sense, in store to-night.

For, as the clapping of hands died down, the whisper of a woman's dress,
upon the asphalt of the verandah just behind him, caught his ear, and
Damaris came rapidly towards him.

"So you are here after all, dear Colonel Sahib," she cried. "I felt you
were when I was down there looking at the fountain. It sort of pulled at
me with remindings of you ages and ages ago, in the gardens of the club
at Bhutpur--when you brought me a present--a darling little green jade
elephant in a sandalwood box, as a birthday gift from Henrietta. Later
there was a terrible tragedy. An odious little boy broke my elephant, on
purpose, and broke my heart along with it."

Carteret made a determined effort over himself, taking her up lightly.

"But not altogether past mending, dear witch--judging by existing
appearances."

"Ah! I'm none so sure of that," Damaris answered him back with a pretty
quickness--"if it hadn't been for you. For I was very ill, when you came
again to the Sultan-i-bagh--don't you remember?--the night of the riots
and great fires in the Civil Lines and Cantonments, just at the breaking
of the monsoon."

"Yes, I remember," he said.

And wondered to himself--thereby gaining ease and a measure of
tranquillity, inasmuch as he thought of another man's plight rather than
of his own--whether Damaris had knowledge of other occurrences, not
unallied to tragedy, which had marked that same night of threatened
mutiny and massacre and of bellowing tempest, not least among them a vow
made by her father, Charles Verity, and made for her sake.

"The whole story comes back in pictures," she went on, "whenever I look
at fountains playing, because of the water-jets in the canal in the
Bhutpur club garden where you gave me Henrietta's present. You see it all
dates from then. And it came back to me specially clearly just now,
partly because I felt lonely--"

"Lonely?--How lonely," he smilingly interjected, "with a goodly youth as
a protector on either hand?"

"Yes--lonely," Damaris repeated, i