“Tell me what?  One of the many things it would never occur to you to confide to Mrs. Frayling?” he said, trying to treat her evident emotion lightly, to laugh it off.

“To Henrietta?  Of course not.  It would be unpardonable, hateful to tell Henrietta.”

She flushed, her face looking, for the moment, dark from excess of colour.

“You are the only person I could possibly tell.”

Carteret moved aside a few steps.  He too felt strangely agitated.  Wild ideas, ideas of unholy aspect, presented themselves to him—­ideas, again, beyond words entrancing and sweet.  He fought with both alike, honestly, manfully.  Returned and took Damaris’ hand quietly, gently in both his.

“Look here, dear witch,” he said, “all this evening a—­to me—­unknown spirit has possessed you.  You haven’t been like yourself.  You have made me a little anxious, a little alarmed on your account.”

“Oh! it isn’t only this evening,” she caught him up.  “It has been going on for weeks.”

“So I have seen—­and that is not good for you, isn’t for your happiness.  So, if I am—­as you say—­the only person you care to acquaint with this matter, had not you better tell me here and now?  Better worry yourself no more with mysteries about it, but let us, once and for all, have the thing out?”

“I should be thankful,” Damaris said simply, looking him in the eyes—­“if I could be sure I wasn’t sacrificing some one else—­their pride I mean—­their—­their honour.”

For a few seconds Carteret paused, meeting her grave and luminous glance.  Then: 

“I think you may risk it,” he said.  “I promise you this some-one-else’s honour shall be sacred to me as my own.  Without your direct request no word of what you choose to tell me will ever pass my lips.”

“Ah!  I’m very sure of that,”—­Her smile, her voice bore transparent testimony to a faith which went, somewhat giddily, not only to her hearer’s heart but to his head.  “It isn’t a question of your repeating anything; but of your thinking differently of some one you care for very much—­and who is almost as dependent on you, Colonel Sahib, as I am myself.  At least I fear you might.—­Oh!  I am so perplexed, I’m in such a maze,” she said.  “I’ve nothing to go on in all this, and I turn it over and over in my mind to no purpose till my head aches.  You see I can’t make out whether this—­the thing which began it all and happened oh! long ago—­is extraordinary—­one which you—­and most people like you—­in your position, I mean—­would consider very wrong and disgraceful; or whether it often happens and is just accepted, taken for granted, only not talked about.”

Carteret felt cold all down his spine.  For what, in God’s name, could this supremely dear and—­as he watched her grave and sweetly troubled countenance—­supremely lovely child, be driving at?