surely new in her. She would not leave him alone,
would not let him rest. Had she developed, since last he had converse
with her, into a practised coquette?

"Look here, dear witch," he said, making a return upon himself, and
manfully withstanding the sweet provocation of her near neighbourhood.
"We seem to be queerly at cross purposes. I can't pretend to follow the
turnings and doublings of your ingenious mind. I gather there is
something you want of me. To be plain, then, what is it?"

"That--that you shouldn't desert me--desert us--in this crisis. You have
never deserted me before--never since I can first remember."

"I desert you--good Lord!" Carteret exclaimed, his hands dropping at his
sides with an odd sort of helplessness.

"Ah! that's asking too much, I suppose," she said. "I'm selfish even to
think of it. Yet how can I do otherwise? Don't you understand how all
difficulties would vanish, and how beautifully simple and easy everything
would be if you coached me--if you, dear Colonel Sahib, went with us?"

The man with the blue eyes looked down at the tiger skin again, his
countenance strained and blanched.

More than ever did he find her humour baffling. Not once nor twice had
he, putting force upon himself, resisted the temptation to woo
her--witness his retirement from St. Augustin and his determined
abstinence from intercourse with her since. But now, so it might
veritably appear, the positions were reversed and she wooed him. Though
whether pushed to that length merely by wayward fancy, by some
transient skittish influence or frolic in the blood, or by realized
design he had no means of judging.--Well, he had bidden her be plain,
and she, in some sort at least, obeyed him. It behooved him, therefore,
to be plain in return, in as far as a straightforward reading of her
meaning would carry.

"So you think all would be simple and easy were I to go with you and your
father?" he said, both speech and manner tempered to gentleness. "I am
glad to have you think so--should be still more glad could I share your
belief. But I know better, dearest witch--know that you are mistaken.
This is no case of desertion--put that out of your precious mind once
and for all--but of discretion. My being in attendance, far from
simplifying, would embroil and distort your position. An elderly
gentleman perpetually trotting"--

"Don't," Damaris cried, holding up both hands in hot repudiation. "Don't
say that. There's disto