“I know—­but it troubles me,” Damaris murmured.  “It is sad.”

“Yes, of course, it is sad.  But it’s just the penalty that is bound to be paid, and which it is useless to ignore or lie to ourselves about.—­So I shall never come, unless he—­Sir Charles—­sends for me as he did to-day, or unless you send.  Only remember your picture will never leave me.  I have it safe and sound”—­Faircloth smiled at her.—­“It will be with me just as actually and ineffaceably as this is with me.”

He patted the back of his left hand.

“Nothing, short of death, can rub either out.  I have pretty thoroughly banked against that, you see.  So you’ve only to send when, and if, you want me.  I shall turn up—­oh! never fear, I shall turn up.”

“And I shall send—­we shall both send,” Damaris answered gravely, even a little brokenly.

The crown might be heavy; but she had strangely ceased to desire to be rid of it, beginning, indeed, to find its weight oddly satisfying, even, it may be asserted, trenching on the exquisite.  And, with this altered attitude, a freedom of spirit, greater than she had enjoyed since the commencement of the whole astonishing episode, since before her cousin Tom Verity’s visit in fact, came upon her.  It lightened her heart.  It dispelled her fatigue—­which throughout the afternoon had been, probably, more of the moral than bodily sort.  Her soul no longer beat its wings against iron bars, fluttered in the meshes of a net; but looked forth shy yet serene, accepting the position in which it found itself.  For Faircloth inspired her with deepening faith.  He needed no guiding, as she told herself; but was strong enough, as his words convincingly testified, clear-sighted and quick-witted enough, to play his part in the complicated drama without prompting.  Hadn’t he done just what she asked?—­Stayed until, by operation of some quality in himself or—­could it be?—­simply through the mysterious draw of his and her brother and sisterhood, she had already grown accustomed, settled in her thought of him, untormented by the closeness of his presence and unabashed.

And having reached this vantage-point, discovering the weight of the crown dear now rather than irksome, Damaris permitted herself a closer observation of her companion than ever before.  Impressions of his appearance she had received in plenty—­but received them in flashes, confusing from their very vividness.  Confusing, also, because each one of them was doubled by a haunting consciousness of his likeness to her father.  The traits common to both men, rather than those individually characteristic of the younger, had been in evidence.  And, in her present happier mood, Damaris also desired a picture to set in the storehouse of memory.  But it must represent this brother of hers in and by himself, divorced, as far as might be, from that pursuing, and, to her, singularly agitating likeness.