dolls.  Only through their aberrations, their unconscious perfidies, iniquities, do they develop definiteness of outline and begin to live.  Oh! nothing could be unkinder than to whitewash them.  Take Mrs. Callowgas, for instance, with one eye on the Church, the other on the world.  The permanent inconsistency of her attitude, as I may say her permanent squint, gives her a certain cachet without which she’d be a positive blank.—­She is most anxious to meet you, by the way, and Sir Charles—­always supposing he is self-sacrificing enough to come—­because she knows connections of his and yours at Harchester, a genial pillar of the Church in the form of an Archdeacon, in whom, as I gather, her dear dead Lord Bishop very much put his trust.”

“Tom Verity’s father, I suppose,” Damaris murmured, her colour rising, the hint of a cloud too upon her brow.

“And who may Tom Verity be?” Mrs. Frayling, noting both colour and cloud, alertly asked.

“A distant cousin.  He stayed with us in the autumn just before he went out to India.  He passed into the Indian Civil Service from Oxford at the top of the list.”

“Praiseworthy young man.”

“Oh! but you would like him, Henrietta,” the girl declared.  “He is very clever and very entertaining too when”—­

“When?”

“Well, when he doesn’t tease too much.  He has an immense amount to talk about, and very good manners.”

“Also, when he does not tease too much?—­And you like him?”

“I don’t quite know,” Damaris slowly said.  “He did not stay with us long enough for me to make up my mind.  And then other things happened which rather put him out of my head.  He was a little conceited, perhaps, I thought.”

“Not unnaturally, being at the top of the pass list.  But though other things put him out of your head, he writes to you?”

In the pussy-warmth within her muff, Mrs. Frayling became sensible that Damaris’ hand grew unresponsive, at once curiously stiff and curiously limp.

“He has written twice.  Once on the voyage out, and again soon after he arrived.  The—­the second letter reached me this week.”

Notwithstanding sunshine, the eager air, and lively bumping of the descent, Henrietta observed the flush fade, leaving the girl white as milk.  Her eyes looked positively enormous set in the pallor of her face.  They were veiled, telling nothing, and thereby—­to Mrs. Frayling’s thinking—­betraying much.  She scented a situation—­some girlish attachment, budding affair of the heart.

“My father gave Tom Verity letters of introduction, and he wanted us to know how kindly he had been received in consequence.”

“Most proper on his part,” Mrs. Frayling said.

She debated discreet questioning, probing—­the establishment of herself in the character of sympathetic confidante.  But decided against that.  It might be impolitic, dangerous even, to press the pace.  Moreover the young man, whatever his attractions, might be held a negligible quantity in as far as any little schemes of her own were concerned at present, long leave and reappearance upon the home scene being almost certainly years distant.—­And, just there, the hand within the muff became responsive once more, even urgent in its seeking and pressure, as though appealing for attention and tenderness.