Sympathetic Mrs. Cooper, comely and comfortable Mary, and the Napoleonic Patch, still reigned in house and stable.  Laura had returned to her former allegiance on the announcement of “the family’s” arrival, and other underlings had been engaged by the upper servants in conclave.  To these latter entered that Ulysses, Mr. Hordle, so rendering the establishment once again complete.

The neighbours duly called—­Dr. and Mrs. Horniblow, conscious of notable preferment, since high ecclesiastical powers had seen fit to present the former to a vacant canonry at Harchester.  For three months yearly he would in future be resident in the cathedral city.  This would necessitate the employment of a curate at Deadham, for the spiritual life of its inhabitants must by no means suffer through its vicar’s promotion.  At the moment of Sir Charles and Damaris’ return the curate excitement was at its height.  It swept through the spinster-ranks of the congregation like an epidemic.  They thrilled with unacknowledgeable hopes.  The Miss Minetts, though mature, grew pink and quivered, confessing themselves not averse to offering board and lodging to a suitable, a well-connected, well-conducted paying guest.  To outpourings on the enthralling subject of the curate, Damaris found herself condemned to listen from every feminine visitor in turn.  It held the floor, to the exclusion of all other topics.  Her own long absence, long journeys, let alone the affairs of the world at large, were of no moment to these very local souls.  So our young lady retired within herself, deploring the existence of curates in general, and the projected, individual, Deadham curate in particular, with a heartiness she was destined later to remember.  Had it been prophetic?—­Not impossibly so, granted the somewhat strange prescience by which she was, at times, possessed.

For the psychic quality that, from a child, now and again had manifested itself in her—­though happily unattended by morbid or hysteric tendencies, thanks to her radiant health—­grew with her growth.  To her, in certain moods and under certain conditions, the barrier between things seen and unseen, material and transcendental, was pervious.  It yielded before the push of her apprehension, sense of what it guards, what it withholds within an ace of breaking through.

Affairs of the heart would, so far, seem to have begun and ended with the winter spent at St. Augustin.  Now and again Damaris met an Englishman, or foreigner, who stirred her slightly.  But if one accident of travel brought them together, another accident of travel speedily swept them apart.  The impression was fugitive, superficial, fading out and causing but momentary regret.  Colonel Carteret she only saw in London, during those two brief visits to England.  He had been captivating, treating her with playful indulgence, teasing a little; but far away, somehow—­so she felt him—­though infinitely kind.  And the dear man with the blue eyes—­for she could use her old name for him again now, though she couldn’t quite tell why—­looked older.  The sentimental passage at St. Augustin assumed improbability—­a fact over which she should, in all reason, have rejoiced, yet over which she, in point of fact when safe from observation, just a little wept.