anfully. Returned and took Damaris' hand quietly, gently in both his.

"Look here, dear witch," he said, "all this evening a--to me--unknown
spirit has possessed you. You haven't been like yourself. You have made
me a little anxious, a little alarmed on your account."

"Oh! it isn't only this evening," she caught him up. "It has been going
on for weeks."

"So I have seen--and that is not good for you, isn't for your happiness.
So, if I am--as you say--the only person you care to acquaint with this
matter, had not you better tell me here and now? Better worry yourself no
more with mysteries about it, but let us, once and for all, have the
thing out?"

"I should be thankful," Damaris said simply, looking him in the eyes--"if
I could be sure I wasn't sacrificing some one else--their pride I
mean--their--their honour."

For a few seconds Carteret paused, meeting her grave and luminous
glance. Then:

"I think you may risk it," he said. "I promise you this some-one-else's
honour shall be sacred to me as my own. Without your direct request no
word of what you choose to tell me will ever pass my lips."

"Ah! I'm very sure of that,"--Her smile, her voice bore transparent
testimony to a faith which went, somewhat giddily, not only to her
hearer's heart but to his head. "It isn't a question of your repeating
anything; but of your thinking differently of some one you care for very
much--and who is almost as dependent on you, Colonel Sahib, as I am
myself. At least I fear you might.--Oh! I am so perplexed, I'm in such
a maze," she said. "I've nothing to go on in all this, and I turn it
over and over in my mind to no purpose till my head aches. You see I
can't make out whether this--the thing which began it all and happened
oh! long ago--is extraordinary--one which you--and most people like
you--in your position, I mean--would consider very wrong and
disgraceful; or whether it often happens and is just accepted, taken for
granted, only not talked about."

Carteret felt cold all down his spine. For what, in God's name, could
this supremely dear and--as he watched her grave and sweetly troubled
countenance--supremely lovely child, be driving at?

"And I care so dreadfully much," she went on. "It is the story of the
darling little green jade elephant over again--like its being broken and
spoilt. Only now I'm grown up I don't give in and let it make me ill.
There was a time even of that--of illness, I mean--at first just before