“Yes, I see,” Carteret said, regardless of strict veracity.  For he didn’t see, though he believed himself on the road to seeing and that some matter of singular moment.

“He was beautiful to me—­beautiful about everything—­everybody,” she asserted.  “And we love one another not less, but more, he and I—­of that I am sure.  Only it’s different—­different.  We can’t either of us quite go back to the time before—­and that has helped to make him sad.”

Carteret listened in increasing interest aware that he sounded unlooked-for depths, apprehensive lest those depths should harbour disastrous occurrences.  He walked the length of the terrace before again speaking.  Then, no longer teasing but gently and seriously, he asked her: 

“Do you feel free to tell me openly about this, and let me try to help you—­if it’s a case for help?”

Damaris shook her head, looking up at him through the soft enclosing murk, and smiling rather ruefully.

“I wish I knew—­I do so wish I knew,” she said.  “But I don’t—­not yet, anyway.  Help me without my telling you, please.  The book is a splendid idea.  And then do you think you could persuade him to let us go away abroad, for a time?  Everything here must remind him—­as it does me—­of what happened.  It was quite right,” she went on judicially—­“for everyone’s sake, we should stay here just the same at first.  People,” with a scornful lift of the head Carteret noted and admired—­“might have mistaken our reason for going away.  They had to be made to understand we were perfectly indifferent.—­I knew all that, though we never discussed it.  One does things, sometimes, just because it’s right they should be done, without any sort of planning—­just by instinct.  Still I know we can’t be quite natural here.  What happened comes between us.  We’re each anxious about the other and feel a constraint, though we never speak of it.  That can’t be avoided, I suppose, for we both suffered a good deal at the time—­but he most, much the most because”—­

Damaris paused.

“Because why?”

“I suppose because I’m young; and then, once I got accustomed to the idea, I saw it meant what was very wonderful in some ways—­a wonderfulness which, for me, would go on and on—­a whole new country for me to explore and travel in, quite my own—­and—­and—­which I couldn’t help loving.”

“Heigh ho! heigh ho!” Carteret put in softly.  “This becomes exciting, dear witch, you know.”

“I don’t want to be tantalizing,” she answered him, still pacing in the growing dimness of land and sea.

The dead black mass of the great ilex trees looked to touch the low hanging sky.  A grey gleam, here and there, lit the surface of the swirling tide-river.  The boom of the slow plunging waves came from the back of the Bar, and now and again wild-fowl cried, faint and distant, out on the mud-flats of the Haven.