blic-servant."

"You?" she cried.

Carteret shook his head, still surveying her but with a soberer glance.

"No--no--not me. In any case there isn't any indebtedness to
acknowledge--no arrears to pay off. I have my deserts.--To a man
immensely my superior. Look nearer home, dear witch."

He made a gesture in the direction of his host.

"My Commissioner Sahib?"

"Yes--your Commissioner Sahib, who comes post haste to request your dear
little permission, before accepting this tardy recognition of his
services to the British Empire."

"Ah! but that's too much!" the girl said softly, glancing from one to the
other, enchanted and abashed by the greatness of their loyalty to and
prominent thought of her.

"Has this made him happy?" she asked Carteret, under her breath. "He
looks so, I think. How good that this has come in time--that it hasn't
come too late."

For, in the midst of her joyful excitement, a shadow crossed Damaris'
mind oddly obscuring the light. She suffered a perception things might so
easily have turned out otherwise; a suspicion that, had the reparation of
which Carteret spoke been delayed, even by a little, its beloved
recipient would no longer have found use for or profit in it. Damaris
fought the black thought, as ungrateful and faithless. To fear disaster
is too often to invite it.

Just at this juncture Miss Felicia made hurried and gently eager
irruption into the hall; and with that irruption the tone of prevailing
sentiment declined upon the somewhat trivial, even though warmly
affectionate. For she fluttered round Sir Charles, as Mary Fisher helped
divest him of his overcoat, in sympathetic overflowings of the simplest
sort.--"She had been reading and failed to hear the carriage, hence her
tardy appearance. Let him come into the drawing-room at once, out of
these draughts. There was a delightful wood fire and he must be chilled.
The drive down the valley was always so cold at night--particularly where
the road runs through the marsh lands by Lampit."

In her zeal of welcome Miss Verity was voluble to the point of
inconsequence, not to say incoherence. Questions poured from her. She
appeared agitated, quaintly self-conscious, so at least it occurred to
Damaris. Finally she addressed Carteret.

"And you too must be frozen," she declared. "How long it is since we met!
I have always been so unlucky in just missing you here! Really I believe
I have only seen you once since you and Charles sta