resently be shown, brings our narrative, though by
devious courses, back to Damaris sweeping the dog-cart to the left across
the bridge spanning the Arne, and on up the long winding ascent, from the
woods and rich meadows in the valley to the wide prospects and keener air
of the moorland above.

Until now, as already chronicled, she had remained in house or garden,
prey to an apathy which, while not amounting to definite ill-health,
refused interest and exertion. She could not shake it off. To her all
things were empty, blank, immensely purposeless. Religion failed to touch
her state--religion, that is, in the only form accessible. The interior
of some frowning Gothic church of old Castile, or, from another angle, of
some mellow Latin basilica, might have found the required mystic word to
say to her. But Protestantism, even in its mild Anglican form, shuts the
door on its dead children with a heavy hand.--And she suffered this
religious coldness, although any idea that death of the body implies
extinction of the spirit, extinction of personality, never occurred to
her. Damaris' sense of the unseen was too ingrained, her commerce with it
too actual for that. No--the spirit lived on. He, her most beloved, lived
on, himself, his very self; but far away from her. In just this consisted
the emptiness, the unspeakable and blank bitterness--he was somewhere and
she could not reach him. The dreadful going away of his spirit, against
which she had fought during the thirty-six hours of his illness, had
reached its ordained consummation--that was all.

The body which had contained and by that beloved spirit been so nobly
animated, in its present awful peace, its blind dumb majesty, meant
scarcely more to her than some alabaster or waxen effigy of her dead. It
was so like, yet so terrifyingly unlike Charles Verity in life!--She had
visited it morning and evening, since to leave it in solitude appeared
wanting in reverence. Throughout each night she thankfully knew that
either Carteret, McCabe or Faircloth watched by it. Yet to her it hardly
retained as much of her father's natural presence as the clothes he had
worn, the books and papers littering his writing-table, the chair he
preferred to sit in, his guns and swords upon the wall, or the collection
of fishing-rods, walking-sticks and his spud stacked in a corner.

After the strain and publicity of the funeral her apathy deepened,
perplexing and saddening Carteret and bringing M