Damaris gathered up a handful of little pebbles, and let them dribble down slowly between her outspread fingers while, turning her head, she gazed away out to sea.

“This is a day by itself,” she said.  “It looks like jewels, topazes, turquoise, and pearls; and it seems full of things which half tell themselves, and then hide from or pass you by.—­I wanted to watch it all and think; and, she doesn’t do it on purpose I know, but somehow Miss Bilson always interferes with my thinking.”

Both the tone and substance of this discourse proved slightly startling to its hearer.  They carried the conversation into regions transcendental; and to his blissful laziness, the rarefied air of those regions was unwelcome.  To breathe it demanded exertion.  So he said, chaffingly: 

“Do I interfere with your thinking?  I hope not.  But if I offend that way, speak but a word and I disappear like a shot.”

“Oh! no,” she answered.  “How could you interfere?  You are part of it.  You started it, you see, because you are going to India.”

Whereat, failing to catch the sequence of ideas, male vanity plumed itself, tickled to the point of amusement.  For was not she a child after all, transparently simple and candid, and very much a woman-child at that!  Tom turning on his side raised himself on one elbow, smiling at her with easy good-nature.

“How charming of you to adopt me as a special object of thought, and care so much about my going.”

But patronage proved short-lived.  The girl’s colour deepened, but her eyes dwelt on him coldly.

“I have only been thinking how fortunate you are, and seeing pictures in my mind of what you will see which will be new to you—­and—­and remembering.”

“Oh! of course, I am lucky, tremendously lucky,” he hastened to declare, laughing a little wryly.  “Such a journey is a liberal education in itself, knocking the insularity out of a man—­if he has any receptive faculty that is—­and ridding him of all manner of stodgy prejudices.  I don’t the least undervalue my good fortune.—­But you talk of remembering.  That’s stretching a point surely.  You must have been a mere baby, my dear Damaris, when you left India.”

“No, I was six years old, and I remember quite well.  All my caring for people, all my thinking, begins there, in the palace of the Sultan-i-bagh at Bhutpur and the great compound, when my father was Chief Commissioner.”

Her snub duly delivered, and she secure it had gone home, Damaris unbent, graciously communicative as never before.

“It was all so beautiful and safe there inside the high walls, and yet a teeny bit frightening because you knew there were other things—­as there are to-day—­which you felt but couldn’t quite see all about you.  Sometimes they nearly pushed through—­I was always expecting and I like to expect.  It hurt me dreadfully to go away; but I had been very ill.  They were afraid