Carteret made a determined effort over himself, taking her up lightly.

“But not altogether past mending, dear witch—­judging by existing appearances.”

“Ah!  I’m none so sure of that,” Damaris answered him back with a pretty quickness—­“if it hadn’t been for you.  For I was very ill, when you came again to the Sultan-i-bagh—­don’t you remember?—­the night of the riots and great fires in the Civil Lines and Cantonments, just at the breaking of the monsoon.”

“Yes, I remember,” he said.

And wondered to himself—­thereby gaining ease and a measure of tranquillity, inasmuch as he thought of another man’s plight rather than of his own—­whether Damaris had knowledge of other occurrences, not unallied to tragedy, which had marked that same night of threatened mutiny and massacre and of bellowing tempest, not least among them a vow made by her father, Charles Verity, and made for her sake.

“The whole story comes back in pictures,” she went on, “whenever I look at fountains playing, because of the water-jets in the canal in the Bhutpur club garden where you gave me Henrietta’s present.  You see it all dates from then.  And it came back to me specially clearly just now, partly because I felt lonely—­”

“Lonely?—­How lonely,” he smilingly interjected, “with a goodly youth as a protector on either hand?”

“Yes—­lonely,” Damaris repeated, ignoring the allusion to her devoted if irascible escort.  “Dance music always makes one rather sad—­don’t you think so?  It seems to ache with everything one wants and hasn’t got; and the ache goes on.—­I turned homesick for—­for India, and for my green jade elephant I used to love so dreadfully much.—­I’ve all that is left of him, still wrapped in the same rice paper in the same sandalwood box you brought him in, put away with my best treasures in my own room at The Hard.”

She came nearer, stood beside him, bending down a little as she rested her hands on the top of the iron balustrade of the verandah, while her eyes followed the curve of the bay to where the lighthouse rose, a black column with flashing headpiece, above the soft glitter of the moonlit sea.

“And homesick, Colonel Sahib, for you,” she said.

“For me?” he exclaimed almost involuntarily, roughly startled out of his partially recovered tranquillity and ease.

“Yes”—­she said, looking up at him.  “Isn’t that quite natural, since you have stepped in so often to help me when things have gone rather wrong?—­I knew you must be somewhere quite close by.  I sort of felt you were there.  And you were there—­weren’t you?  Why did you hide yourself away?”

Carteret could not bring himself immediately to answer.  He was perplexed, infinitely charmed, distrustful, all at once—­distrustful, though for very different reasons, both of himself and of her.

“Are things, then, going rather wrong now?” he asked presently.

For he judged it wise to accept her enigmatic speech according to its most simple and obvious interpretation.  By so doing he stood, moreover, to gain time; and time in his existing perplexity appeared to him of cardinal importance.