could feel, she could picture, a drama of rare quality with those two figures as protagonists.  It dazzled while wounding her.  She remembered Faircloth’s words, spoken on that evening of fateful disclosure when knowledge of things as they are first raped her happy ignorance, while the boat drifted through the shrouding darkness of rain upon the inky waters of the tide-river.—­“They were young,” he had said, “and mayn’t we allow they were beautiful?  They met and, God help them, they loved.”

The statement covered this case, also, to a nicety.  It explained everything.  But what an explanation, leaving her, Damaris, doubly orphaned and desolate!  For the first case, that of which Faircloth actually had spoken, brought her royal, if secret compensation in the brotherhood and sisterhood it made known.  But this second case brought nothing, save a sense of being tricked and defrauded, the victim of a conspiracy of silence.  For nothing, as it now appeared, was really her own, nor had really belonged to her.  “Some one,” so she phrased it in the incoherence of her pain, “had always been there before her.”  What she supposed her exclusive property was only second-hand, had been already owned by others.  They let her play at being first in the field, original and sole proprietress, because it saved them trouble by keeping her quiet and amused.  But all the while they knew better and must have smiled at her possessive antics once her silly back was turned.  And here Damaris lost sight of reasonable proportion and measure, exaggerating wildly, her pride and self-respect cut to the quick.

It was thus, in the full flood of mystification and resentment, Charles Verity found her when presently he returned.  Sensible of something very much amiss, since she stayed within the shadow of the closed shutters, silent and motionless, he crossed the room and stood before her looking down searchingly into her upturned face.  Stubborn in her misery, she met his glance with mutinous, and hard, if misty, eyes.

“Weeping, my dear?  Is the occasion worth it?  Has Mrs. Frayling then taken so profound a hold?” he asked, his tone mocking, chiding her yet very gently.

Damaris hedged.  To expose the root of her trouble became impossible under the coercion of that gently bantering tone.

“It’s not Henrietta’s going; but that I no longer mind her going.”

“A lost illusion—­yes?” he said.

“I can’t trust her.  She—­she isn’t kind.”

“Eh?” he said.  “So you too have made that illuminating little discovery.  I supposed it would be only a matter of time.  But you read character, my dear, more quickly than I do.  What it has taken you months to discover, took me years.”

His frankness, the unqualified directness of his response, though startling, stimulated her daring.

“Then—­then you don’t really like Henrietta?” she found audacity enough to say.