rked independent of her will,
so that she could neither prevent or arrest it. Sir Charles showed
himself scrupulously attentive and courteous to General Frayling. He
offered no spoken objection to her association with Henrietta. Yet an
unexplained element did remain. Subtlely, but perceptibly, it permeated
both her father's and Henrietta's speech and bearing. She, Damaris, was
always conscious of a certain constraint beneath their calm and
apparently easy talk. Was their relation one of friendship or of covert
enmity?--Or did these, just perceptible, peculiarities of it betoken
something deeper and closer still?

Suspicion once kindled spreads like a conflagration.--Damaris' hands
dropped, a dead weight, into her lap. She sat, strained yet inert, as
though listening to catch the inner significance of her own unformulated
question, her eyes wide and troubled, her lips apart. For might it not be
that they had once--long ago--in the princely, Eastern pleasure palace of
her childhood--cared in _that_ way?

Then the tears which, what with tiredness and the labour pains of her
many conflicting emotions, had threatened more than once to-day, came
into their own. She wept quietly, noiselessly, the tears running down her
cheeks unchecked and unheeded. For there was no escape. Turn where she
would, join hands with whom she would in all good faith and innocence,
this thing reared its head and, evilly alluring looked at her. Now it set
its claim upon her well-beloved Sultan-i-bagh--and what scene could in
truth be more sympathetic to its display? She felt the breath of high
romance. Imagination played strange tricks with her. She could feel, she
could picture, a drama of rare quality with those two figures as
protagonists. It dazzled while wounding her. She remembered Faircloth's
words, spoken on that evening of fateful disclosure when knowledge of
things as they are first raped her happy ignorance, while the boat
drifted through the shrouding darkness of rain upon the inky waters of
the tide-river.--"They were young," he had said, "and mayn't we allow
they were beautiful? They met and, God help them, they loved."

The statement covered this case, also, to a nicety. It explained
everything. But what an explanation, leaving her, Damaris, doubly
orphaned and desolate! For the first case, that of which Faircloth
actually had spoken, brought her royal, if secret compensation in the
brotherhood and sisterhood it made known. But this s