Her mouth was soft, her eyes alight—­dangerously alight now, for her pulse had quickened.  As she pleaded and protested her temperature raced up.

“It happened later,” she went on, “when we were in the boat, and it was partly my fault.  He wrapped my feet up in his coat.  They were very cold.  And he believed I was asleep because I didn’t speak or thank him.  I was so tired, and everything seemed so strange.  I couldn’t rouse myself somehow to speak.  And as he wrapped them in his coat, he kissed my feet, thinking I shouldn’t know.  But I wasn’t asleep, and it displeased me.  I felt angry, just as you felt when you condemned him just now.”

“Ah! as I felt just now!” he commented, closing his eyes and, just perceptibly, bowing his head.

“Yes, Commissioner Sahib, as you felt just now—­but as, please you mustn’t go on feeling.—­What he had done seemed to me treacherous; and it pained as well as displeased me.  But in all that I was unjust and mistaken.—­And it was then, because he saw he’d pained me, displeased and made me angry, that he told me in self-defence—­told me to show he wasn’t treacherous, but had the right—­a right no one else in all the world has over me except yourself.”

“And you believed this young man, you forgave his audacity, and admitted his right?” Sir Charles said.

He leaned back in the angle of the chair, away from her, smiling as he spoke—­a smile which both bade farewell and mocked at the sharpness and futility of the grief which that farewell brought with it.  For this was a grown woman who pleaded with him surely, acting as advocate?  A child, compelled to treat such controversial, such debatable matters at all, would have done so to a different rhythm, in a different spirit.

“Forgave him?  But after just the first, when, I had time to at all think of it,” Damaris answered with rather desperate bravery, “I couldn’t see there was anything for me to forgive.  It was the other way about.  For haven’t I so much which he might very well feel belonged, or should have belonged, to him?”

“You cut deep, my dear,” Sir Charles said quietly.

Still holding back the curtain with one hand, Damaris flung herself over upon her face.  She would not give way, she would not cry, but her soul was in travail.  These words, as coming from her father, were anguish to her.  She could look at him no longer, and lying outstretched thus, the lines of her gracious body, moulded by the embroidered linen quilt, quivered from head to heel.  Still that travail of soul should bring forth fruit.  She would not give in, cost what anguish it might, till all was said.

“I only want to do what is right,” she cried, her voice half stifled by the pillows.  “You know, surely you know, how I love you, Commissioner Sahib, from morning till night and round till morning again, always and above all, ever since I can first remember.  But this is different to anything that has ever happened to me before, and it wouldn’t be right not to speak about it.  It would be there all the time, and it would creep in between us—­between you and me—­and interfere in all my thinking about you.”