A sentence from the English marriage service flashed across her mind.—­“With my body I thee worship,” it ran, “and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”

“With my body I thee worship”—­He, her father’s elect and beloved friend, in whom she had always so beautifully trusted, who had never failed her, the dear man with the blue eyes—­and she, Damaris?  Her womanhood, revealed to itself, at once shrank back bewildered, panic-stricken, and, passion-stricken, called to her aloud.

For here Carteret’s grace of bearing and of person, his clean health, physical distinction and charm, arose and confronted her.  The visible, tangible attributes of the man—­as man—­presented themselves in fine relief, delighting her, stirring her heretofore dormant senses, begetting in her needs and desires undreamed of until now, and, even now, in substance incomprehensible.  She was enchanted, fevered, triumphant; and then—­also incomprehensibly—­ashamed.

As the minutes passed, though the triumph continued to subsist, the shame subsisted also, so that the two jostled one another striving for the mastery.  Damaris took her hands from her face, again clasped them about her drawn-up knees, and sat, looking straight in front of her with sombre, meditative eyes.  To use a phrase of her childhood, she was busy with her “thinkings”; her will consciously hailing emotion to the judgment-seat of intelligence for examination and for sentence.

If this was what people commonly understand when they speak of love, if this was the love concerning which novelists write and poets sing—­this riot of the blood and heady rapture, this conflict of shame and triumph in which the animal part of one has so loud a word to say—­she didn’t like it.  It was upsetting, to the confines of what she supposed drunkenness must be.  It spoilt things heretofore exquisite, by giving them too high a colour, too violent a flavour.  No—­she didn’t like it.  Neither did she like herself in relation to it—­like this unknown, storm-swept Damaris.  Nor—­for he, alas! couldn’t escape inclusion—­this new, unfamiliar presentment of the man with the blue eyes.  Yet—­and here was a puzzle difficult of solution—­even while this new presentment of him, and conception of his sentiment towards her, pulled him down from his accustomed pedestal in her regard, it erected for him another pedestal, more richly sculptured and of more costly material—­since had not his manifold achievements, the whole fine legend as well as the whole physical perfection of him, manifested themselves to, and worked upon her as never before?—­Did this thing, love, then, as between man and woman, spring from the power of beauty while soiling and lowering beauty—­bestow on it an hour of extravagant effulgence, of royal blossoming, only to degrade it in the end?—­The puzzle is old as humanity, old, one may say, as sex.  Little wonder if Damaris, sitting up in her maidenly bedchamber, in the unsullied brightness of the early morning hour, failed to find any satisfactory answer to it.