“I don’t pretend to be a great letter-writer, so if this one has funny fashions to it you must forgive both them and me.  I write as I feel and must leave it so.  The voyage has been good, and my poor old tub has behaved herself, kept afloat and done her best, bravely if a bit wheezingly, in some rather nasty seas.  When we are through here I take her across to Tripoli and back along the African coast to Algiers, then across to Marseilles.  I reckon to reach there in six weeks or two months from now.  You might perhaps be willing to write a line to me there—­to the care of my owners, Messrs. Denniver, Holland & Co.  Their office is in the Cannebiere.  I don’t ask you to do this, but only tell you I should value it more than you can quite know.—­Now my holiday is over and I will close down till next Christmas-night—­unless miracles happen meanwhile—­so good-bye.—­Here is a boatload of my lads coining alongside, roaring with song and as drunk as lords.—­God bless you.  In spirit I once again kiss your dear feet.  Your brother till death and after.

“DARCY FAIRCLOTH.”

Dazed, enchanted, held captive by the secular magic pertaining to those who “go down to the sea in ships” and ply their calling in the great waters, held captive, too, by the mysterious prenatal sympathies which unite those who come of the same blood, Damaris stayed very still, sitting child-like upon the bare polished floor, while the wind murmured through the spreading pines, shading the terrace below, and gently fanned her throat and temples.

For Faircloth’s letter seemed to her very wonderful, alike in its vigour, its simplicity and—­her lips quivered—­its revelation of loving.—­How he cared—­and how he went on caring!—­There were coarse words in it, the meaning of which she neither knew nor sought to know; but she did not resent them.  The letter indeed would have lost some of its living force, its convincing reality, had they been omitted.  They rang true, to her ear.  And just because they rang true the rest rang blessedly true as well.  She gloried in the whole therefore, breathing through it a larger air of faith and hope, and confident fortitude.  The kindred qualities of her own heart and intelligence, the flush of her fine enthusiasm, sprang to meet and join with the fineness of it, its richness of promise and of good omen.

For a time mind and emotion remained thus in stable and exalted equilibrium.  Then, as enchantment reached its necessary term and her apprehensions and thought began to work more normally, she badly wanted someone to speak to.  She wanted to bear witness, to testify, to pour forth both the moving tale and her own sensations, into the ear of some indulgent and friendly listener.  She—­she—­wanted to tell Colonel Carteret about it, to enlist his interest, to read him, in part at least, Darcy Faircloth’s letter, and hear his confirmation of the noble spirit she discerned in it, its poetry, its charm.  For the dear man with the blue eyes would understand, of that she felt confident, understand fully—­and it would set her right with him, if, as she suspected, he was not somehow quite pleased with her.  She caressed the idea, while, so doing, silence and concealment grew increasingly irksome to her.  Oh! she wanted to speak—­and to her father she could not speak.