And—­and Colonel Carteret?  For now somehow she no longer, even in thought, could call him by her old name for him, “the dear man with the blue eyes.”—­Could it be true, as Henrietta intimated, that he went through life throwing the handkerchief first to one woman and then to another?  That there was no real constancy or security in his affections, but all was lightly come and lightly go with him?

How her poor head ached!  She held it in both hands and closed her eyes.—­She would not think any more about Colonel Carteret.  To do so made her temples throb and raised the lump, which is a precursor of tears, in her throat.

No—­she couldn’t follow Henrietta’s statements and arguments either way.  They were self-contradictory.  Still, whose ever the fault, that the young man Wace should be unhappy on her account, should think she—­Damaris—­had behaved heartlessly to him, was quite dreadful.  Humiliating too—­false conscience again gnawing.  Had she really contracted a debt towards him, which she—­in his opinion and Henrietta’s—­tried to repudiate?  She seemed to hear it, the rich impassioned voice, and hear it with a new comprehension.  Was “caring in that way” what it had striven to tell her; and had she, incomparably dense in missing its meaning, appeared to sanction the message and to draw him on?  Other people understood—­so at least Henrietta implied; while she, remaining deaf, had rather cruelly misled him.  Ought she not to do something to make up?  Yet what could she do?—­It had never occurred to her that—­that—­

She held her head tight.  Held it on, as with piteous humour she told herself, since she seemed in high danger of altogether losing it.—­Must she believe herself inordinately stupid, or was she made differently to everybody else?  For, as she now suspected, most people are constantly occupied, are quite immensely busy about “caring in that way.”  And she shrank from it; actively and angrily disliked it.  She felt smirched, felt all dealings as between men and women made suspect, rendered ugly, almost degraded by the fact—­if fact it was—­of that kind of caring and excited feelings it induces, lurking just below the surface, ready to dart out.—­And this not quite honestly either.  The whole matter savoured of hypocrisy, since the feelings disguised themselves in beautiful sounds, beautiful words, clothing their unseemliness with the noble panoply of poetry and art, masquerading in wholesome garments of innocent good-comradeship.

—­A grind of wheels on the gravel below.  Henrietta’s neat limpid accents and Charles Verity’s grave ones.  The flourish and crack of a whip and scrambling start of the little chestnut horses.  The rhythmical beat of their quick even trot and thin tinkle of their collar bells receding into the distance.