of some man's lust. He schooled
himself, while Damaris' heart beat a little tempestuously under his hand,
to invite a conclusion which through every nerve and fibre he loathed.

"My dear," he said, "I spoke unadvisedly with my lips just now, letting
crude male jealousy get the mastery of reason and common sense. Put my
words out of your mind. They were unjustifiable, spoken in foolish heat.
If you are in love with anyone"--

Damaris nestled against him.

"Only with you, dearest, I think," she said.

Charles Verity hesitated, unable to speak through the exquisite blow she
delivered and his swift thankfulness.

"Let us put the question differently then--translating it into the
language of ordinary social convention. Tell me, has anyone
proposed to you?"

Damaris, still nestling, shook her head.

"No--no one. And I hope now, no one will. I escaped that, partly thanks
to my own denseness.--It is not an easy thing, Commissioner Sahib, to
explain or talk about. But I have come rather close to it lately,
and"--with a hint of vehemence--"I don't like it. There is something in
it which pulls at me but not at the best part of me. So that I am divided
against myself. Though it does pull, I still want to push it all away
with both hands. I don't understand myself and I don't understand it, I
would rather be without it--forget it--if you think I am free to do so,
if you are satisfied that I haven't intentionally hurt anyone or
contracted a--a kind of debt of honour?"

"I am altogether satisfied," he said. "Until the strange and ancient
malady attacks you in a very much more virulent form, you are free to
cast Henrietta Frayling's insinuations to the winds, to ignore them and
their existence."

BOOK IV

THROUGH SHADOWS TOWARDS THE DAWN

CHAPTER I

WHICH CARRIES OVER A TALE OF YEARS, AND CARRIES ON

The last sentence was written. His work finished. And, looking upon his
completed creation, Charles Verity saw that it was good. Yet, as he put
the pen back in the pen-tray and, laying the last page of manuscript face
downwards upon the blotting-paper passed his hand over it, he was less
sensible of exultation than of a pathetic emptiness. The book had come to
be so much part of him that he felt a nasty wrench when he thus finally
rid himself of it.

He had kept the personal pronoun out of it, strictly and austerely,
desiring neither self-glorification nor self-advertisement. Yet his mind
and attitude towa