igh danger of altogether losing it.--Must
she believe herself inordinately stupid, or was she made differently to
everybody else? For, as she now suspected, most people are constantly
occupied, are quite immensely busy about "caring in _that_ way." And she
shrank from it; actively and angrily disliked it. She felt smirched, felt
all dealings as between men and women made suspect, rendered ugly, almost
degraded by the fact--if fact it was--of that kind of caring and excited
feelings it induces, lurking just below the surface, ready to dart
out.--And this not quite honestly either. The whole matter savoured of
hypocrisy, since the feelings disguised themselves in beautiful sounds,
beautiful words, clothing their unseemliness with the noble panoply of
poetry and art, masquerading in wholesome garments of innocent
good-comradeship.

--A grind of wheels on the gravel below. Henrietta's neat limpid accents
and Charles Verity's grave ones. The flourish and crack of a whip and
scrambling start of the little chestnut horses. The rhythmical beat of
their quick even trot and thin tinkle of their collar bells receding into
the distance.

These sounds to our sorrowfully perplexed maiden opened fresh fields of
uneasy speculation. For those diverse accents--the speakers being
unseen--heard thus in conjunction, seized on and laboured her
imagination. Throughout the past months of frequent meeting, Damaris had
never quite understood her father's attitude towards Henrietta Frayling.
It was marked by reserve; yet a reserve based, as she somehow divined,
upon an uncommon degree of former intimacy. Judging from remarks let drop
now and again by Henrietta, they knew, or rather had known, one another
very well indeed. This bore out Damaris' own childhood's recollections;
though in these last she was aware of lacunae, of gaps, of spaces
unbridged by any coherent sequence of remembered events. A dazzling and
delicious image, the idol of her baby adoration--thus did memory paint
that earlier Henrietta. Surrounding circumstances remained shadowy. She
could not recall them even in respect of herself, still less in respect
of her father. So that question, as to the past, ruled the present. What
had parted them, and how did they to-day envisage one another? She could
not make out. Had never, indeed, attempted seriously to make out, shying
from such investigation as disloyal and, in a way, irreverent. Now
investigation was forced on her. Her mind wo