hods of death, when a name leapt at him weighted
with personal meaning.

"It hit me," Faircloth said, "full between the eyes, knocking the
cry-baby stuff out of me, and knocking stuff of very different order in.
For I wanted something stronger than mother-love--precious though that
is--to brace me up and put some spunk into me just then.--Sir Charles was
campaigning in Afghanistan, and this Calcutta paper sang his praises to a
rousing tune. Lamented the loss of him to the Indian Government, and the
lack of appreciation and support of him at home which induced him to take
foreign service. Can't you imagine how all this about a great soldier,
whose blood after all ran in my veins, pulled me clean up out of the
slime, where suicide tempted the soft side of me, into another world?--A
sane world, in which a man can make good, if only he's pluck to hold
on.--Yes, he saved me; or at all events roused the spirit in me which
makes for salvation, and which that drunken brute had almost killed. But,
because I was only a boy as yet, with a boy's queer instincts and
extravagancies, I made the monkey-faced, Japanese eating-house
keeper--who added artistic tattooing to other and less reputable ways of
piling up a fortune--fix the sea-bird, for faith in my profession--and
those three initials of my own name and a name not altogether my own,
right here.--Fix them for remembrance and for a warning of which I could
never get free. Always I should be forced to see it. And others must see
it too. Through it my identity--short of mutilation--was indestructibly
established. From that identity, henceforward, there wasn't any possible
running away."

Faircloth had ended on a note of exultation, calmly sounded yet profound.

And upon that final note Damaris dwelt now, sitting on the chintz-covered
window-seat of the room which Carteret would to-night inhabit. She went
through the cruel story again, while the transparent twilight drew its
elfin veil over all things, outdoor and in.

The crescent moon, a slender, upright wisp of a thing, climbed the
southern sky. And Damaris' soul was strangely satisfied, for the story,
if cruel, was one of restitution and the healing of a wrong. To her
father--his father--the boy had turned in that bad hour, which very
perfectly made for peace between them. The curve of her duty to the one,
as she now apprehended, in nowise cut across or deflected the curve of
her duty towards the other. The two were the same,