A few paces from and above him, Damaris sat on the crown of the ridge, where the light southerly wind, coming up now and again off the sea, fanned her.  A white knitted jersey, pulled on over her linen dress, moulded the curve of her back, the round of her breasts and turn of her waist, showing each movement of her gracious young body to the hips, as she leaned forward, her knees drawn up and her feet planted among the red, orange, and cream-grey flints and pebbles.

Looking up at her, Tom saw her face foreshortened in the shade of her broad brimmed garden hat, a soft clear flush on it born of health, fresh air and sunlight, her eyes shining, the blue of the open sea in their luminous depths.  He received a new impression of her.  She belonged to the morning, formed part of the gladness of universal Nature, an unfettered nymph-like being.  To-day her mood was sprightly, bidding farewell to ceremony.  Yet, he felt, she remained perplexing, because more detached than is the feminine habit, poised and complete in herself.

And this detachment, this suppression of the sentimental or social note—­he being admittedly a very personable fellow—­piqued Tom’s male vanity, so that he rallied her with: 

“But by the way, why did you vanish so early, why didn’t you stay with us after dinner last night?”

“I did not want to vanish,” she answered.  “Nothing is more delightful than hearing my father talk.  But had I stayed Miss Bilson would have supposed herself free to stay too, and that would have spoiled the evening.  My father doesn’t choose to talk freely before Miss Bilson, because she gets into a foolish excited state and interrupts and asks questions.  She overflows with admiration and that annoys and bores him.”

“‘She brought him butter in a lordly dish,’” Tom quoted.  “The ill-advised Bilson.  Can’t one just see her!”

“And it is not her place to admire out loud,” Damaris continued.  “Over and over again I have tried to explain that to her.  But in some ways, she is not at all clever.  She can’t or won’t understand, and only tells Aunt Felicia I am wanting in sympathy and that I hurt her feelings.  She has unreasonably many feelings, I think, and they are so easily hurt.  I always know when the hurting takes place because she sniffs and then plays Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words on the schoolroom piano.”

Tom chuckled.  She had a caustic tongue on occasion, this nymph-like creature!

“Alas, poor Bilson!” he said.  “For, as Sir Charles walked across the garden with us down to the ferry, didn’t I hear those same sugary melodies tinkling out of some upper open window?”

“I am afraid you did.  You see she had made up her mind to come with me.”

“And you were forced to intimate you found yourself quite equal to conducting the expedition unshepherded?”

“I did not mean to be unkind, but she would have been so dreadfully in the way”—­