Faircloth, meanwhile, being closely observant of her, was quick to detect her agitation.  He drew aside her chair, and backed away, leaving her free to pass.

“I am afraid we have talked too long,” he said.  “You’re tired.  I ought to have been more careful of you, remembered how ill you have been—­and that partly through my doing too.  So now, I had better bid you good-bye, I think, and leave you to rest.”

But Damaris, contriving to smile tremulous lips notwithstanding, shook her head.  For, in lifting her hand from his, she caught sight of the tattooed blue-and-crimson sea-bird and the initials below it.  And again her heart contracted with a spasm of tenderness; while those three letters, more fully arresting her attention, aroused in her a fascinated, half-shrinking curiosity.  What did they mean?  What could they stand for?  She longed intensely to know—­sure they were in some sort a symbol, a token, not without special significance for herself.  But shyness and a quaint disposition, dating from her childhood, to pause and hover on the threshold of discovery, thus prolonging a period of entrancing, distracting suspense, withheld her.  She dared not ask—­in any case dared not ask just yet; and therefore took up his words in their literal application.

“Indeed, you haven’t talked too long,” she assured him, as she went over to the tiger skin before the fire-place, and standing there looked down into the core of the burning logs.  “We have only just begun to talk, so it isn’t that which has tried me.  But—­if you won’t misunderstand—­pray don’t—­the thought of—­of you, and of all that which lies between us, is still very new to me.  I haven’t quite found you, or myself in my relation to you, yet.  Give me time, and indeed, I won’t disappoint you.”

Faircloth, who had followed her, put his elbows on the mantelshelf, and sinking his head somewhat between his shoulders, stared down at the burning logs too.

“Ah! when you take that tone, I’m a little scared lest I should turn out to be the disappointment, the failure, in this high adventure of ours,” he said under his breath.

“So stay, please,” the young girl went on, touched by, yet ignoring, his interjected comment.  “Let me get as accustomed as I can now, so that I may feel settled.  That is the way to prevent my being tired—­the way to rest me, because it will help to get all my thinkings about you into place.—­Yes, please stay.—­That is,” she added with a pretty touch of ceremony—­“if you have time, and don’t yourself wish to go.”

“I wish it!  What, in heaven’s name, could well be further from any wish of mine?” Faircloth broke out almost roughly, without raising his eyes.  “Do you suppose when a man’s gone thirsty many days, he is in haste to forego the first draught of pure water offered to him—­and that after just putting his lips to the dear comfort of it?”

“Ah! you care too much,” Damaris cried, smitten by swift shrinking and dread.