And from such prickings he sensibly suffered to-night, as he leaned his shoulder against the iron pillar of the verandah at the Hotel de la Plage, and looked down into the claire obscure of the moonlit gardens, while over the polished floor of the big room at his back, the rhythmical tread of the dancers’ feet kept time to the music of piano and sweet wailing strings.—­For that a change showed increasingly evident in Damaris he could not disguise from himself.  In precisely what that change consisted it was not easy to say.  He discovered it more in an attitude of mind and atmosphere than in outward action or even in words said.  But she was not quite the same as the grave and steadfast young creature who had asked his help for her father, and indirectly for herself, in the moist chill of the November twilight at The Hard—­and who, receiving promise of such help, had darted away over the drenched lawn in company with the wildly gambolling cats alternately pursuing and pursued.  Nor was she quite the same as when he had walked with her, through the resounding Paris streets, to pay her devoirs to her former guardians and teachers at the convent school; and, later returning, had spoken to her of the safety of religion, the high worth of the doctrine and practice of a definite historic creed.

Her relation to her father appeared—­and this pained Carteret—­to lack its old intimacy, its intensity of consideration and tenderness.  Her interest in the child of his brain, his belated literary experiment, was less sustained and spontaneous.  How could it flourish in its former proportions when she was so much away, so often absent from morning till night?—­Not without leave though, for she scrupulously asked permission before answering Henrietta’s gay call and taking part in that lady’s junketings and jaunts.  Sir Charles never refused the requested permission; but, while granting it, did he not tend to retreat into his former sardonic humour, fall into long silences, become inaccessible again and remote?  The book went forward; yet, more than once recently, Carteret had questioned whether his friend would ever get himself fairly delivered of the admirable volume were not he—­Carteret—­permanently at hand to act midwife.  An unpleasant idea pursued him that Sir Charles went, in some strange fashion, in fear of Damaris, of her criticism, her judgment.  Yet fear seemed a hatefully strong and ugly word to employ as between a father and daughter so straitly, heretofore, bound to one another in love.

And then—­there lay the heart of the worry, proving him only too likely a graceless jealous middle-age curmudgeon, a senile sentimentalist, thus did he upbraidingly mock himself—­were there not signs of Damaris developing into a rather thorough paced coquette?  She accepted the homage offered her with avidity, with many small airs and graces—­a la Henrietta—­of a quite novel sort.  Old General Frayling—­poor pathetic old warrior—­was