, on the instant, into full possession of her wandering wits.
She remembered the nature of that charmingly pleasant something; yet
paused, before yielding it attention, held captive by the spectacle of
returning day.

It was early. The disc of the sun still below the horizon. But shafts of
light, striking up from it, patterned the underside of a vast dapple of
fleecy cloud--heliotrope upon the back-cloth of blue ether--with fringes
and bosses of scarlet flame. Against this, occupying the foreground, the
pine trees, which sheltered the terrace, showed up a deep greenish purple
bordering upon black.

Leaning out over the polished wooden bar--which topped the ironwork of
the window-guard--Damaris sought and gained sight of the sea. This,
darker even than the tufted foliation of the pines--since still untouched
by sunlight--spread dense and compact as molten metal, with here and
there a sheen, like that of the raven's wing, upon its corrugated
surface. To Damaris it appeared curiously forbidding. Seeing it thus she
felt, indeed, to have taken Nature unawares, surprised her without
disguise; so that for once she displayed her veritable face--a face not
yet made up and camouflaged to conceal the fact of its in-dwelling terror
from puny and defenceless man.

With that the girl's thoughts flew, in longing and solicitude, to
Faircloth, whose business so perpetually brought him into contact with
Nature thus naked and untamed.--By now, and over as sinister a sea--since
westward the dawn would barely yet have broke--the _Forest Queen_ must be
steaming along the Andalusian coast, making for Gibraltar and the Straits
upon her homeward voyage. And by some psychic alchemy, an influence more
potent and tangible than that of ordinary thought, her apprehension fled
out, annihilating distance, bridging intervening space. For, just as
certainly as Damaris' fair body leaned from the open window, so certainly
did her fair soul or--to try a closer and more scientific definition--her
living consciousness, stand in the captain's cabin of the ocean-bound
tramp, making Darcy Faircloth turn smiling in his sleep, he having vision
and glad sense of her--which stayed by him, tempering his humour to a
peculiar serenity throughout the ensuing day.

That their correspondence was no fictitious one, a freak of disordered
nerves or imagination, but sane and actual, both brother and sister could
convincingly have affirmed. And this although time--as time