self to ask her:

"And about this other person--for we have wandered a bit from the point
at issue, haven't we?--whose interests as I gather clash, for some
reason, with those of your father, and whose pride and honour you are so
jealously anxious to safeguard."

"His pride, yes," Damaris said quickly, her head high, a warmth in her
tone. "His honour is perfectly secure, in my opinion."

"Whose honour is in danger then?--Dear witch, forgive me, but don't you
see the implication?"

Damaris looked around at him with unfathomable eyes. Her lips parted, yet
she made no answer.

After a pause Carteret spoke again, and, to his own hearing, his voice
sounded hoarse as that of the tideless sea upon the beach yonder.

"Do you mean me to understand that the conflict between your father's
interests and those of this other person--this other man's--arise from
the fact that you love him?"

"Yes," Damaris calmly declared.

"Love him,"--having gone thus far Carteret refused to spare himself. He
turned the knife in the wound--"Love him to the point of marriage?"

There, the word was said. Almost unconsciously he walked onward without
giving time for her reply.--He moistened his lips, weren't they dry as a
cinder? He measured the height to which hope had borne him, to-night, by
the shock, the positive agony of his existing fall. At the young girl,
_svelte_ and graceful, beside him, he could not look; but kept his eyes
fixed on the mass of the wooded promontory, dark and solid against the
more luminous tones of water and of sky, some half-mile distant. Set high
upon the further slope of it, from here invisible, the Grand Hotel
fronted--as he knew--the eastward trending coast. Carteret wished the
distance less, since he craved the shelter of that friendly yellow-washed
caravanserai. He would be mortally thankful to find himself back there,
and alone, the door of his bachelor quarters shut--away from the beat of
the waves, away from the subtle glory of this Venus-ridden moon now
drawing down to her setting. Away, above all, from Damaris--delivered
from the enchantments and perturbations, both physical and moral, her
delicious neighbourhood provoked.

But from that fond neighbourhood, as he suddenly became aware, he was in
some sort delivered already. For she stopped dead, with a strange choking
cry; and stood solitary, as it even seemed forsaken, upon the wide grey
whiteness of the asphalt of the esplanade. Behind her a line of