To begin with she had, in the past week, crossed a certain bridge there is no going back over for whoso, of her sex, is handicapped or favoured—­in mid-nineteenth century the handicap rather than the favour counted even more heavily than it does to-day, though even to-day, as some of us know to our cost, it still counts not a little!—­by possession of rarer intelligence, more lively moral and spiritual perceptions, than those possessed by the great average of her countrymen or countrywomen.  Damaris’ crossing of that bridge—­to carry on the figure—­affected her thought of, and relation to everyone and everything with which she now came in contact.  She had crossed other bridges on her eighteen years’ journey from infancy upwards; but, compared with this last, they had been but airy fantastic structures, fashioned of hardly more substantial stuff than dreams are made of.—­Thus, anyhow, it appeared to her as she lay resting in her pink-and-white curtained bed, watching the loose rose-sprays tremble against the rain-spattered window-panes.—­For this last bridge was built of the living stones of fact, of deeds actually done; and, just because it was so built, for one of her perceptions and temperament, no recrossing of it could be possible.

So much to begin with.—­To go on with, even before Dr. McCabe granted her permission to emerge from retirement, all manner of practical matters claimed her attention; and that not unwholesomely, as it proved in the sequel.  For with the incontinent vanishing of Theresa Bilson into space, or,—­more accurately—­into the very comfortable lodgings provided for her by Miss Verity in Stourmouth, the mantle of the ex-governess-companion’s domestic responsibilities automatically descended upon her ex-pupil.  The said vanishing was reported to Damaris by Mary, on the day subsequent to its occurrence, not without signs of hardly repressed jubilation.  For “Egypt,” in this case represented by the Deadham Hard servants’ hall, was unfeignedly “glad at her departing.”

“A good riddance, I call it—­and we all know the rest of that saying,” Mrs. Cooper remarked to an audience of Hordle and Mary Fisher, reinforced by the Napoleonic Patch and his wife—­who happened to have looked in from the stables after supper—­some freedom of speech being permissible, thanks to the under-servants’ relegation to the kitchen.

“I never could see she was any class myself.  But the airs and graces she’d give herself!  You’ll never persuade me she wasn’t sweet on the master.  That was at the back of all her dressings up, and flouncings and fidgetings.  The impidence of it!—­You may well say so, Mrs. Patch.  But the conceit of some people passes understanding.  To be Lady Verity, if you please, that was what she was after.  To my dying day I shall believe it.  Don’t tell me!”