“His pride, yes,” Damaris said quickly, her head high, a warmth in her tone.  “His honour is perfectly secure, in my opinion.”

“Whose honour is in danger then?—­Dear witch, forgive me, but don’t you see the implication?”

Damaris looked around at him with unfathomable eyes.  Her lips parted, yet she made no answer.

After a pause Carteret spoke again, and, to his own hearing, his voice sounded hoarse as that of the tideless sea upon the beach yonder.

“Do you mean me to understand that the conflict between your father’s interests and those of this other person—­this other man’s—­arise from the fact that you love him?”

“Yes,” Damaris calmly declared.

“Love him,”—­having gone thus far Carteret refused to spare himself.  He turned the knife in the wound—­“Love him to the point of marriage?”

There, the word was said.  Almost unconsciously he walked onward without giving time for her reply.—­He moistened his lips, weren’t they dry as a cinder?  He measured the height to which hope had borne him, to-night, by the shock, the positive agony of his existing fall.  At the young girl, svelte and graceful, beside him, he could not look; but kept his eyes fixed on the mass of the wooded promontory, dark and solid against the more luminous tones of water and of sky, some half-mile distant.  Set high upon the further slope of it, from here invisible, the Grand Hotel fronted—­as he knew—­the eastward trending coast.  Carteret wished the distance less, since he craved the shelter of that friendly yellow-washed caravanserai.  He would be mortally thankful to find himself back there, and alone, the door of his bachelor quarters shut—­away from the beat of the waves, away from the subtle glory of this Venus-ridden moon now drawing down to her setting.  Away, above all, from Damaris—­delivered from the enchantments and perturbations, both physical and moral, her delicious neighbourhood provoked.

But from that fond neighbourhood, as he suddenly became aware, he was in some sort delivered already.  For she stopped dead, with a strange choking cry; and stood solitary, as it even seemed forsaken, upon the wide grey whiteness of the asphalt of the esplanade.  Behind her a line of lamps—­pale burning under the moonlight—­curved, in perspective, with the curving of the bay right away to the lighthouse.  On her left the crowded houses of the sleeping town, slashed here and there with sharp edged shadows, receded, growing indistinct among gardens and groves.  The scene, as setting to this single figure, affected him profoundly, taken in conjunction with that singular cry.  He retraced the few steps dividing him from her.

“Marriage?” she almost wailed, putting out her hands as though to prevent his approach.  “No—­no—­never in life, Colonel Sahib.  You quite dreadfully misunderstand.”

“Do I?” Carteret said, greatly taken aback, while, whether he would or no, unholy ideas again flitted through his mind maliciously assailing him.