With that both Damaris’ attitude and expression changed, the glory abruptly departing.  She got up off the floor, left the window, and sat down very soberly, in a red-velvet covered arm-chair, placed before the flat stone hearth piled with wood ashes.

There truly was the fly in the ointment, the abiding smirch on the otherwise radiant surface—­as she now hailed it—­of this strangely moving fraternal relation.  The fact of it did come, and, as she feared, would inevitably continue to come between her and her father, marring to an appreciable degree their mutual confidence and sympathy.  At Deadham he had braced himself to deal with the subject in a spirit of rather magnificent self-abnegation.  But the effort had cost him more than she quite cared to estimate, in lowered pride and moral suffering.  It had told on not only his mental but his physical health.  Now that he was in great measure restored, his humour no longer saturnine, he no longer remote, sunk in himself and inaccessible, it would be not only injudicious, but selfish, to the verge of active cruelty, to press the subject again upon his notice, to propose further concessions, or further recognition of its existence.  She couldn’t ask that of him—­ten thousand times no, she couldn’t ask it—­though not to ask it was to let the breach in sympathy and confidence widen silently and grow.

So much was sadly clear to her.  She unfolded Faircloth’s letter and read it through a second time, in vain hope of discovering some middle way, some leading.  Read it, feeling the first enchantment but all cross-hatched now and seamed with perplexity and regret.  For decent barriers must stand, he declared, which meant concealment indefinitely prolonged, the love of brother and sister wasted, starved to the mean proportions of an occasional furtive letter; sacrificed, with all its possibilities of present joy and future comfort, to hide the passage of long-ago wrongdoing in which it had its source.

Her hesitation went a step behind this presently, arguing as to how that could be sin which produced so gracious a result.  It wasn’t logical an evil tree should bear such conspicuously good fruit.  Yet conscience and instinct assured her the tree was indeed evil—­a thing of license, of unruly passion upon which she might not look.  Had it not been her first thought—­when Faircloth told her, drifting down the tide-river in the chill and dark—­that he must feel sad, feel angry having been wronged by the manner of his birth?  He had answered “yes,” thereby admitting the inherent evil of the tree of which his existence was the fruit—­adding, “but not often and not for long,” since he esteemed the gift of life too highly to be overnice as to the exact method by which he became possessed of it.  He palliated, therefore, he excused, but he did not deny.