Oh! he surpassed himself!  Was too indulgent, too munificent to her!—­As on a former occasion, she totted up the sum of his good deeds.  Hadn’t he given up his winter’s sport for her sake?  Didn’t she—­and wouldn’t an admiring English reading public presently—­owe to his suggestion her father’s noble book?  When she had run wild for a space, and sold herself to unworthy frivolities, hadn’t he led her back into the right road, and that with the lightest, courtliest, hand imaginable, making all harmonious and sweetly perfect, once more, between her father and herself?  Lastly, hadn’t he procured her her heart’s desire in the meeting with Darcy Faircloth—­and, incidentally, given her the relief of free speech, now and whenever she might desire to claim it, concerning the strange and secret relationship which dominated her imagination and so enriched the hidden places of her daily life and thought?

Damaris held up the hand-mirror contemplating his gift, this necklace of pearls; and, from that, by unconscious transition fell to contemplating her own face.  It interested her.  She looked at it critically, as at some face other than her own, some portrait, appraising and studying it.  It was young and fresh, surely, as the morn—­in its softness of contour and fine clear bloom; yet grave to the verge of austerity, owing partly to the brown hair which, parted in the middle and drawn down in a plain full sweep over the ears, hung thence in thick loose plait on either side to below her waist.  She looked long and curiously into her own eyes, “dear wonderful eyes,” as Faircloth, her brother, so deliciously called them.  And with that her mouth curved into a smile, sight of which brought recognition, new and very moving, of her own by no means inconsiderable beauty.

She went red, and then white almost as her white nightdress and the white pillows behind her.  Laid the mirror hastily down, and held her face in both hands as—­as Carteret had held it last night, at the moment of parting, when he had kissed not her lips but her forehead.  Yet very differently, since she now held it with strained, clinging fingers, which hurt, making marks upon the flesh.—­For could it be that—­the other kind of love, such as men bear the woman of their choice, which dictated Carteret’s unfailing goodness to her—­the love that he had bitterly and almost roughly defended when she praised the love of brother and sister as dearest, purest, and therefore above all best?

Was it conceivable this hero of a hundred almost fabulous adventures, of hair-breath escapes, and cunningly defied dangers in Oriental, semi-barbarous, wholly gorgeous, camps, Courts and cities, this philosopher of gently humorous equanimity, who appeared to weigh all things in an equal balance and whom she had regarded as belonging to an age and order superior to her own, had set his affections upon her singling her out from among all possible others?  That he wanted her for his own, wanted her exclusively and as his inseparable companion, the object of—­