“But don’t we all love Cousin Felicia?” he returned, promptly, eager to maintain his advantage.  “Isn’t she kindness incarnate, Christian charity personified?  As for me, I simply dote on her; and with reason, for ever since those remote ages in which I wore scratchy pinafores and horrid little white socks, she has systematically and pertinaciously spoiled me whenever she stayed at Canton Magna.—­Oh! she is an institution.  No family should be without her.  When I was small she gave me chocolates, tin soldiers, pop-guns warranted to endanger my brothers’ and sisters’ eyesight.  And now, in a thousand ways, conscious and unconscious,” he laughed quietly, naughtily, the words running over each other in the rapidity of his speech—­“she gives me such a blessed good conceit of myself!”

And Damaris Verity, caught by the wave of his light-heartedness and inherent desire to please, softened again, her serious eyes alight for the moment with answering laughter.  Whereupon Tom crossed the threshold and stood close beside her upon the grass in the brooding sunshine, the beds of scarlet and crimson geraniums ranging away on glowing perspective to left and right.  He glanced at the three ladies seated beneath the giant ilexes, and back at his companion.  He felt absurdly keen further to excite her friendliness and dispel her gravity.

“Only one must admit cousin Harriet is quite another story,” he went on softly, saucily.  “Any conceit our dear Felicia rubs in to you, Harriet most effectually rubs out.  Isn’t it so?  I am as a worm, a positive worm before her—­can only ‘tremble and obey’ like the historic lady in the glee.  She flattens me.  I haven’t an ounce of kick left in me.  And then why, oh why, tell me, Damaris, does she invariably and persistently clothe herself in violet ink?”

“It is her colour,” the girl said, her eyes still laughing, her lips discreetly set.

“But why, in heaven’s name, should she have a colour?” he demanded.  “For identification, as I have a red and white stripe painted on my steamer baggage?  Really that isn’t necessary.  Can you imagine losing cousin Harriet?  Augustus Cowden mislaying her, for example; and only recovering her with joyful cries—­we take those for granted in his case, of course—­at sight of the violet ink?  Not a bit of it.  You know as well as I do identification marks can’t ever be required to secure her return, because under no conceivable circumstances could she ever be lost.  She is there, dear lady, lock, stock, and barrel, right there all the time.  So her raiment of violet amounts to a purely gratuitous advertisement of a permanently self-evident fact.—­And such a shade too, such a positively excruciating shade!”

But here a movement upon the terrace served, indirectly, to put a term to his patter.  For Sir Charles Verity, raising his voice slightly in passing emphasis, turned and moved slowly towards the little company gathered at the tea-table.  His two companions followed, the shorter of them apparently making answer, the words echoing clearly in genial richness of affirmation across the intervening space—­“And so it was, General, am I not recalling the incident myself?  Indeed you’re entirely right.”