If only she could speak of it!  But that was forbidden by every obligation of filial piety.  Never had her relation to her father been more tender, more happy; yet only through sudden pressure of outward circumstance could she speak to him of Faircloth.  To do so, without serious necessity, would be, as she saw it, a wanton endangering of his peace.—­If only the dear man with the blue eyes hadn’t removed himself!  She had counted upon his permanent support and counsel, on his smoothing away difficulties from the path of her dealings with Faircloth; but he appeared to have given her altogether the go-by, to have passed altogether out of her orbit.  And meditating, in the softly bright May weather beneath those high forget-me-not blue skies, upon his defection, our maiden felt quite desperately experienced and grown up, thrown back upon her own resources, thrown in upon her rather solitary life.

Throughout the summer visitors came and went; but never those two desired figures, Faircloth or Carteret.  Dr. McCabe, vociferous in welcome, affectionate, whimsical and choleric, trundled over from Stourmouth on a bicycle of phenomenal height.

“On the horse without wheels I’m proficient enough,” he declared.  “Know the anatomy of the darlin’ beast as well as I do my own, inside and out.  But, be dashed, if the wheels without the horse aren’t beyond me quite.  Lord love you, but the skittish animal’s given me some ugly knocks, cast me away, it has, in the wayside ditch, covering me soul with burning shame, and me jacket with malodorous mud.”

At intervals Aunt Harriet Cowden and Uncle Augustus drove over in state the twelve miles from Paulton Lacy—­the lady faithful to garments dyed, according to young Tom Verity, in the horrid hues of violet ink.  She expressed her opinions with ruthless frankness, criticized, domineered, put all and sundry in—­what she deemed—­“their place”; and departed for the big house on the confines of Arnewood Forest again, to, had she but known it, a chorus of sighings of relief from those she left behind her and on whose emotional and intellectual tastes and toes she so mercilessly trod.

Garden parties, tennis tournaments, the Napworth cricket week, claimed Damaris’ attendance in turn, along with agreeable display of her foreign spoils in the matter of Paris hats and frocks.  Proofs arrived in big envelopes perpetually by post; first in the long, wide-margined galley form, later in the more dignified one of quire and numbered page.  The crude, sour smell of damp paper and fresh printer’s ink, for the first time assailed our maiden’s nostrils.  It wasn’t nice; yet she sniffed it with a quaint sense of pleasure.  For was it not part of the whole wonderful, beautiful business of the making of books?  To the artist the meanest materials of his art have a sacredness not to be denied or ignored.  They go to forward the birth of the precious whole, and hence are redeemed, for him, from all charge of common or uncleanness.