Whereupon rapture gave place to a pang of jealous alarm and resentment.  For they belonged to her, those dear two; and to see them even thus temporarily appropriated by someone else caused her surprising agitation.  They had been so good, so apparently content, alone with her upon this journey.  It would be too trying, too really intolerable to have outsiders interfere and break up their delightful solitude a trois, their delightful intercourse!  Yet, almost immediately, the girl flushed, going hot all over with shame, scolding herself for even passing entertainment of such unworthy and selfish emotions.

“For it is Henrietta Pereira,” she said half aloud.  “My own darling, long-ago Henrietta, who used to be so beautifully kind to me and give me presents I loved above everything.”

And, after a pause, the note of alarm sounding again though modified to wistfulness—­

“Will she care for me still, and shall I still care for her—­but I must care—­I must—­now I’m grown up?”

To set which disturbing questions finally at rest, being a valiant young creature, Damaris permitted herself no second thoughts, no vacillation or delay; but went straight downstairs and crossing the strip of terrace garden, bare-headed as she was, waited at the head of the steps leading up from the carriage drive to greet the idol of her guileless infancy.

To Colonel Carteret who, bringing up the rear of the little procession was the first to notice her advent, she made a touching and gallant picture.  Her face had gone very pale and he saw, or fancied he saw, her lips tremble.  But her solemn eyes shone with a steady light, and, whatever the excitement affecting her, she held it bravely in check.  Noting all which he could not but speculate as to whether she had any knowledge of a certain romantic attachment—­culminating on the one hand in an act of virtuous treachery, on the other in an act of renunciation—­which had overshadowed and wrenched from its natural sequence so large a portion of her father’s life.  He earnestly hoped she was ignorant of all that; although the act of renunciation, made for her, Damaris’ sake, represented a magnificent gesture if an exaggerated and almost fanatical one, on Charles Verity’s part.  It gave the measure of the man’s fortitude, the measure of his paternal devotion.  Still knowledge of it might, only too readily, prove a heavy burden to a young girl’s imaginative and tender conscience.  Yes—­he hoped she had been spared that knowledge.

If she had escaped it thus far—­as he reflected not without amusement—­the other actor in that rather tragic drama, now so unexpectedly and arrestingly present in the flesh, could be trusted not to enlighten her.  He knew Henrietta Pereira of old, bless her hard little heart.  Not only did she detest tragedy, but positively revelled in any situation where clever avoidance of everything even remotely approaching it was open to her.  She ruled the sublime and the ridiculous alike impartially out of the social relation; and that with so light though determined a touch, so convincing yet astute a tact and delicacy, you were constrained not only to submit to, but applaud her strategy.