The sight of Charles Verity did indeed put back the clock for her in most astounding sort.  Henrietta was no victim of impulse.  Each of her three marriages had been dictated by convenience, carefully thought out and calculated.  Over neither husband had she, for ever so brief a period, lost her head.  But over Charles Verity she had come perilously near losing it—­once.  That, it is not too much to say, constituted the greatest sensation, the greatest emotion of her experience.  As a rule the most trying and embarrassing part of encountering a former lover is that you wonder what, under Heaven, induced you to like him so well?  Here the position was reversed, so that Henrietta wondered—­with a sickening little contraction of the heart—­what, under Heaven, had prevented her liking him much more, why, under Heaven, she ever let him go?  Of course, as things turned out, it was all for the best, since her insensibility made for righteousness, or anyhow for respectability—­in the opinion of the world the same, if not an even superior article.  She ought to congratulate herself, ought to feel thankful.  Only just now she didn’t.  On the contrary she was shaken—­consciously and most uncomfortably shaken to the very deepest of such depths as her shallow soul could boast—­sitting here, on a buff-painted chair in the shade of the pines and ilex trees, in company with Damaris, holding the girl’s hand in both her own with a clinging, slightly insistent, pressure as it rested upon her lap.

“Dearest child, I believe, though you have grown so tall, I should have recognized you anywhere,” she said.

“And I you,” Damaris echoed.  “I did, I did, after just the first little minute.”

“Ah! you’ve a memory for faces too?”

Her glance wandered to the group of men gathered before the hotel portico—­Sir Charles and General Frayling side by side, engaged in civil if not particularly animated conversation.  The two voices reached her with a singular difference of timbre and of tone.  Carteret spoke, apparently making some proposition, some invitation, in response to which the four passed into the house.

Henrietta settled herself in her chair with a movement of sensible relief.  While they remained there she must look, and it was not quite healthy to look.—­Her good, little, old General, who only asked respectfully to adore and follow in her wake—­a man of few demands and quite tidy fortune—­and after poor, besotted, blustering, gambling, squashily sentimental and tearful Johnnie Pereira wasn’t he a haven of rest—­oh, positively a haven of rest?  All the same she preferred his not standing there in juxtaposition to Charles Verity.  She much preferred their all going indoors—­Carteret along with the rest, if it came to that.

She turned and smiled upon Damaris.

“However good your memory for faces may be, I find it very sweet you should have recognized mine after ‘just the first little minute,’” she said, with a coaxing touch of mimicry.  “You haven’t quite parted company with the baby I remember so well, even yet.  I used to call you my downy owl, with solemn saucer eyes and fierce little beak.  You were extraordinarily, really perplexingly like your father then.  A miniature edition, but so faithful to the original it used, sometimes, to give me the quaintest jump.”