“She won’t condescend to tell me so, being resolved to keep me very much in my proper place,” Henrietta continued; “but I learned yesterday from Mary Ellice—­Harry’s sister, who lives with her—­that she is intensely desirous to meet Sir Charles.  She wants to talk to him about Afghanistan and North-west Frontier policy.  A brother of hers it appears was at one time in the Guides; and she is under the impression your father and Colonel Carteret would have known him.—­By the way, dearest child, they do mean to honour me, those two, don’t they, with their presence on Thursday?”

“Of course they will, since you asked them.  Why, they love to come and see you.”

“Do they?” Mrs. Frayling said—­“Anyhow, let us hope so.  I can trust Carteret’s general benevolence, but I am afraid your father will be unutterably bored with my rubbishing little assembly.”

“But, of course, he’ll be nice to everybody too—­as tame and gentle as possible with them all to please you, don’t you see, Henrietta.”

“Ah! no doubt, all to please me!” she repeated.  And fell to musing, while the carriage, quitting at last the rough forest track, rattled out on to the metalled high road, white in dust.

Here the late afternoon sun still lay hot.  The booming plunge of the tideless sea, breaking upon the rocks below, quivered in the quiet air.  Henrietta Frayling withdrew her hands from her muff, unfastened the collar of her sable cape.  The change from the shadowed woods to this glaring sheltered stretch of road was oppressive.  She felt strangely tired and spent.  She trusted Damaris would not perceive her uncomfortable state and proffer sympathy.  And Damaris, in fact, did nothing of the sort, being very fully occupied with her own concerns at present.

Half a mile ahead, pastel-tinted, green-shuttered houses—­a village of a single straggling street—­detached themselves in broken perspective from the purple of pine-crowned cliff and headland beyond.  Behind them the western sky began to grow golden with the approach of sunset.  The road lead straight towards that softly golden light—­to St. Augustin.  It led further, deeper into the gold, deeper, as one might fancy, into the heart of the coming sunset, namely to the world-famous seaport of Marseilles.

Damaris sought to stifle remembrance of this alluring fact, as soon as it occurred to her.  She must not dally with it—­no she mustn’t.  To in anywise encourage or dwell on it, was weak and unworthy, she having accepted the claims of clearly apprehended duty.  She could not go back on her decision, her choice, since, in face of the everlasting hills, she had pledged herself.

So she let her eyes no longer rest on the high-road, but looked out to sea—­where, as tormenting chance would have it, the black hull of a big cargo boat, steaming slowly westward, cut into the vast expanse of blue, long pennons of rusty grey smoke trailing away from its twin rusty-red painted funnels.