s really heroic.
And that this action, specially in a man of his temperament, may claim to
be heroic there can be, in my opinion, no manner of doubt."

The path climbed steeply through the pine wood. Damaris' hand grew
heavy on Carteret's arm. Once she stumbled, and clung to him in
recovering her footing, thereby sending an electric current tingling
through his nerves again.

"He did what was painful, you mean, and for my sake?"

"Say rather gave up something very much the reverse of painful,"
Carteret answered, his voice not altogether under control, so that it
struck away, loud and jarring, between the still ranks of the
tree-trunks to right and left.

"Which is harder?"

"Which is much harder--immeasurably, incalculably harder, dearest witch."

After a space of silence, wherein the pines, lightly stirred by some
fugitive up-draught off the sea, murmured dusky secrets in the vault of
interlacing branches overhead, Carteret spoke again. He had his voice
under control now. Yet, to Damaris' hearing, his utterance was permeated
by an urgency and gravity almost awe-inspiring, here in the loneliness
and obscurity of the wood. She went in sudden questioning,
incomprehensible fear of the dear man with the blue eyes. His arm was
steady beneath her hand, supporting her. His care and protection sensibly
encircled her, yet he seemed to her thousands of miles away, speaking
from out some depth of knowledge and of reality which hopelessly
transcended her experience. She felt strangely diffident, strangely
ignorant. Felt, though she had no name for it, the mystical empire,
mystical terror of sex as sex.

"The night of the breaking of the monsoon, of those riotings and fires at
Bhutpur, your father bartered his birthright, in a certain particular,
against your restoration to health. The exact nature of that renunciation
I cannot explain to you. The whole transaction lies beyond the range of
ordinary endeavour; and savours of the transcendental--or the
superstitious, if you please to take it that way. But call it by what
name you will, his extravagant gamble with the Lords of Life and Death
worked, apparently. For you got well; and you have stayed well, dear
witch--thanks to those same Lords of Life and Death, whose favour your
father attempted to buy with this act of personal sacrifice. He was
willing to pay a price most men would consider prohibitive to secure your
recovery. And, with an unswerving sense of honour, he has go