“It may very well do that in any case, my dear,” he said.

“No—­no,” Damaris answered hotly, “not if I do right now—­right by both.  For you must not entertain wrong ideas about him—­about Captain Faircloth I mean.  You must not suppose he said a word about my having what might, or ought to be his.  He couldn’t do so.  He isn’t the least that sort of person.  He took pains to make me understand—­I couldn’t think why at first, it seemed a little like boasting—­that he is quite well off and that he’s very proud of his profession.  He doesn’t want anything from—­from us.  Oh! no,” she cried, “no.”

And, in her excitement, Damaris raised herself, from the small of her back, resting on her elbows, sphinx-like in posture, her hands and arms—­from the elbows—­stretched out in front of her across the pillows.  Her face was flushed, her eyes blazed.  There was storm and vehemence in her young beauty.

“No—­he’s too much like you, you yourself, Commissioner Sahib, to want anything, to accept anything from other people.  He means to act for himself, and make people and things obey him, just as you yourself do.  And,” she went on, with a daring surely not a little magnificent under the circumstances—­“he told me he loved life too well to care very much how he came by it to begin with.”

Damaris folded her arms, let her head sink on them as she finished speaking, and lay flat thus, her face hidden, while she breathed short and raspingly, struggling to control the after violence of her emotion.

The curtain hung straight.  The wind took up its desolate chant again.  And Sir Charles Verity sat back in the angle of the arm-chair, motionless, and, for the present, speechless.

In truth he was greatly moved, stirred to the deep places of perception, and of conscience also.  For this death of childhood and birth of womanhood undoubtedly presented a rare and telling spectacle, which, even while it rent him, in some aspects enraged and mortified him, he still appreciated.  He found, indeed, a strangely vital, if somewhat cruel, satisfaction in looking on at it—­a satisfaction fed, on its more humane and human side, by the testimony to the worth of the unknown son by the so well-beloved daughter.  Respecting himself he might have cause for shame; but respecting these two beings for whose existence—­whether born in wedlock or out of it—­he was responsible, he had no cause for shame.  In his first knowledge of them as seen together, they showed strong, generous, sure of purpose, a glamour of high romance in their adventitious meeting and companionship.