t health--grew with her growth. To her,
in certain moods and under certain conditions, the barrier between things
seen and unseen, material and transcendental, was pervious. It yielded
before the push of her apprehension, sense of what it guards, what it
withholds within an ace of breaking through.

Affairs of the heart would, so far, seem to have begun and ended with the
winter spent at St. Augustin. Now and again Damaris met an Englishman, or
foreigner, who stirred her slightly. But if one accident of travel
brought them together, another accident of travel speedily swept them
apart. The impression was fugitive, superficial, fading out and causing
but momentary regret. Colonel Carteret she only saw in London, during
those two brief visits to England. He had been captivating, treating her
with playful indulgence, teasing a little; but far away, somehow--so she
felt him--though infinitely kind. And the dear man with the blue
eyes--for she could use her old name for him again now, though she
couldn't quite tell why--looked older. The sentimental passage at St.
Augustin assumed improbability--a fact over which she should, in all
reason, have rejoiced, yet over which she, in point of fact when safe
from observation, just a little wept.

From Henrietta some few letters reached her. One of them contained the
news that Marshall Wace, surmounting his religious doubts and
scruples--by precisely what process remained undeclared--had at last
taken Holy Orders. Concerning this joyful consummation Henrietta waxed
positively unctuous. "He had gone through so much"--the old cry!--to
which now was added conviction that his own trials fitted him to minister
the more successfully to his brethren among the sorely tried.

"His preaching will, I feel certain, be quite extraordinarily original
and sympathetic--full of poetry. And I need hardly tell you what an
immense relief it is both to the General and to myself to feel he is
settled in life, and that his future is provided for--though not,
alas! in the way I fondly hoped, and which--for his happiness' sake
and my own--I should have chosen," she insidiously and even rather
cynically wrote.

But, if in respect of the affections our maiden, during these two years,
made no special progress and gained no further experimental knowledge of
the perilous workings of sex, her advance in other departments was ample.

For faith now called to her with no uncertain note. The great spiritual
force