“Ah, why waste precious time in putting questions to which you surely already know the answer?” with a touch of reproach she took him up.  “Show me rather where you live—­where you eat and sleep, where you walk up and down, walk quarter-deck, when you are far away there out at sea.”

“Does all that really interest you?”

Damaris’ lips quivered the least bit.

“Why have you turned perverse and doubting?  Isn’t it because they interest me, above and beyond anything, beautifully interest me, that I am here?—­It would have been very easy to stay away, if I hadn’t wanted—­as I do want—­to be able to fancy you from morning until night, to know where you sit, know just what you first see when in the grey of the morning you first wake.”

Faircloth continued to look at her; but his expression softened, gaining a certain spirituality.

“I have questioned more than once to-day whether I had not been foolhardy in letting you come here—­whether distance wasn’t safest, and the hunger of absence sweeter than the full meal of your presence for—­for both of us, things being between us as they actually are.  What if the bubble burst?—­I have had scares—­hideous scares—­lest you should be disappointed in me.”

“Or you in me?” Damaris said.

“No.  Only your being disappointed in me could disappoint me in you—­and hardly that, because you’d have prejudice, facts even, natural and obvious enough ones, upon your side.  Faircloth’s Inn on Marychurch Haven and your Indian palace, as basis to two children’s memories and outlook, are too widely divergent, when one comes to think of it.  When listening to you and Colonel Carteret talking at luncheon I caught very plain sight of that.  Not that he talked of set purpose to read me a wholesome lesson in humility—­never in life.  He’s not that sort.  But the lesson went home all the more directly for that very reason.—­Patience one little minute,” he quickly admonished her as she essayed to speak—­“patience.  You ask, with those dear wonderful eyes of yours, what I’m driving at.—­This, beloved one—­you see the waiting carriage over there.  Hadn’t we best get into it, turn the horses’ heads citywards again, and drink our tea, you and I, on the way up to the station somewhere very much else than on board this rough-and-tumble rather foul-breathed cargo boat?—­I’m so beastly afraid you may be disgusted and shocked by the interval between what you’re accustomed to and what I am.  To let you down”—­

Faircloth’s handsome face worked.  Whereat Damaris’ diffidence took to itself wings and flew away.  Her heart grew light.

“Let me down?” she said.  “You can’t let me down.  Oh! really, really you’re a little slow of comprehension.  We are in this—­in everything that has happened since I first knew who you are, and everything which is going to happen from now onwards—­in it together.  What joins us goes miles, miles deeper and wider than any petty surface things.  Must I tell you how much I care?  Can’t you feel it for yourself?”