“And yet I don’t know why.”

“Don’t you?  Well, I think I do perhaps know why; and knowing, I must confess to being not altogether sorry your confidences are restricted, dear witch, in that particular direction.”

The use of the pet name, though involuntary—­possibly on that very account—­eased his fever.  Clearly he must get back to their former relation.  Rejoice in her beauty, in her sweet faith and dependence, love her—­yes—­he admitted the word,—­but for God’s sake keep the physical side out of the business.  Damaris’ easily-aroused loyalty, meanwhile, caught alight.

“Oh, but we’ve just been Henrietta’s guests,” she said, with a pretty mingling of appeal and rebuke—­“and it seems hardly kind, does it, to find faults in her.  She has been beautifully good to me all this time, ending up with this dance which she gave on purpose to please me.”

“And herself also,” Carteret returned.

—­Yes decidedly he felt better, steadier, to the point of now trusting himself to look at his companion, notwithstanding the strange influences abroad in the magical moonlight, with his accustomed smiling, half-amused indulgence.  The unremitting trample of the waves, there on the right, made for level-headedness actually if a little mercilessly—­so he thought.

“I don’t wish to be guilty of taking Mrs. Frayling’s name in vain a second time,” he went on—­“you’ve pulled me up, and quite rightly, for doing so once already—­but depend upon it, she enjoyed her ball every morsel as much as you did.  In respect of the minor delights of existence, she slumbers not nor sleeps, our perenially charming and skilful Henrietta.”

“You think she enjoyed it too?  I am glad.”

Then after an interval of silence, her whole figure alert, her speech eager: 

“See there—­see there, Colonel Sahib—­yes, far, far out to sea—­aren’t those the lights of a ship?”

“Yes,” he answered—­“creeping westward—­bound for Toulon, most likely, or possibly for Marseilles.”

And he would have moved forward.  But Damaris unaccountably lingered.  Carteret waited a good three to four minutes to suit her convenience; but the delay told on him.  The night and hour down here by the shore, on the confines of the silent town, were too full of poetry, too full of suggestion, of the fine-drawn excitement of things which had been and might not impossibly again be.  It was dangerous to loiter, and in such company, though waves might beat out a constant reminder with merciless pertinacity upon the beach.

“Come, dear witch, come,” he at last urged her.  “We still have more than a mile to go and a pretty stiff hill to climb.  It grows late, you will be abominably tired to-morrow.  Why this fascination for a passing steamer, probably some unromantic, villainously dirty old tramp too, you would not condescend to look at by daylight.”

“Because,”—­Damaris began.  She came nearer to him, her expression strangely agitated.—­“Oh!  Colonel Sahib, if I could only be sure it wasn’t treacherous to tell you!”