“Yes—­here are my husband, General Frayling, and Mr. Wace his cousin—­he shall sing to you some day—­that by the way—­who is travelling with us.  But they must talk to you later.  I can’t spare you to them now.  I am greedy after our long separation and want to have you all to myself.”

And, including the four gentlemen in a gesture of friendly farewell, she put her arm round Damaris’ waist, gently compelling her in the direction of a group of buff-painted iron chairs, placed in a semicircle in the shade of ilex and pine trees at the end of the terrace.

“I have so much to hear,” she said, “so many dropped threads to pick up, and it is impossible to talk comfortably and confidentially in a crowd.  Our men must really contrive to play about by themselves for a little while and leave me to enjoy you in peace.”

“But won’t they mind?” Damaris asked, upon whom the spell of the elder woman’s personality began sensibly to work.

“Let them mind, let them mind,” she threw off airily in answer.  “So much the better.  It will do them good.  It is excellent discipline for men to find they can’t always have exactly their own way.”

Which assertion served to dissipate any last remnant of jealous alarm Damaris’ mind may have unconsciously harboured.  In its place shy curiosity blossomed, and quick intimate pleasure in so perfectly fashioned and furnished a creature.  For wasn’t her childish adoration fully justified?  Wasn’t her darling Henrietta a being altogether captivating and unique?  Damaris loved the feeling of that arm and hand lightly clasping her waist.  Loved the faint fragrance—­hadn’t it intoxicated her baby senses?—­pervading Henrietta’s hair, her clothes, her whole pretty person.  Loved the tinkle of the bunch of trinkets dangling from the long chain which reached below her waist.  She had feared disappointment.  That, as she now perceived, was altogether superfluous.  Henrietta enthralled her eyes, enthralled her affection.  She longed to protect, to serve her, to stand between her and every rough wind which blew, because she was so pretty, so extraordinarily and completely civilized from head to foot.

No doubt in the generosity of her youthful inexperience Damaris exaggerated the lady’s personal charm.  Yet the dozen years intervening—­since their last meeting—­had, in truth, dealt mercifully with the latter’s good looks.  A trifle pinched, a trifle faded she might be, as compared with the Henrietta of twelve years ago; but immediately such damage, such wear and tear of the fleshly garment, showed at its least conspicuous.  She negotiated the double encounter, as Carteret had noted, with admirable sang-froid; but not, as to the first one in any case, without considerably greater inward commotion than he gave her credit for.  She was in fact keyed up by it, excited, taken out of herself to an unprecedented extent, her native optimism and egoism in singular disarray.  Yet thereby, through that very excitement, she recaptured for the time being the physical loveliness of an earlier period.  Beauty is very much a matter of circulation; and the blood cantered, not to say galloped, through Henrietta’s veins.