I should die and so Dr. McCabe—­he was here when you arrived yesterday—­insisted on my being sent to Europe.  A lady—­Mrs. Pereira—­and my nurse Sarah Watson took me to Paris, to the convent school where I was to be educated.  It was all very strange, but the nuns were kind.  I liked their religion, and I got accustomed to the other little girls.  I had rooms of my own; and French friends of my father’s visited me and took me out on half-holidays.  And Aunt Felicia came over to fetch me for the summer vacations and brought me here”—­

Damaris pointed across the tide-way to the river frontage, including with one sweeping gesture the whole demesne of The Hard from the deep lane on the one hand, opening funnel-like upon the shore, past sea-wall—­topped at the corner by pink plumed tamarisk, the small twin cannons and pyramid of ball—­the lawn and irregular white house overlooking it, backed and flanked by rich growth of trees, to a strip of sandy warren and pine scrub on the other, from out which a line of some half-dozen purple stemmed, red branched Scotch firs, along with the grey stone built Inn and tarred wooden cottages on the promontory beyond, showed through a dancing shimmer of heat haze, against the land-locked, blue and silver waters of Marychurch Haven.

“I did not like being here at all at first,” she told him.  “I thought it a mean place only fit for quite poor people to live in.  The house seemed so pinched and naked without any galleries or verandahs.  And I was afraid because we had so few servants and neither door-keepers or soldiers.  I could not believe that in England there is so little need for protection against disaffected persons and thieves.  The sunshine was pale and thin, and the dusk made me sad.  At Bhutpur the sun used to drop in flame behind the edge of the world and night leap on you.  But here the day took so long dying.  Aunt Felicia used to praise what she called ’the long sweet English twilight,’ and try to make me stop out in the garden to enjoy it with her.  But I could not bear it.  The colours faded so slowly.  It seemed like watching some helpless creature bleed to death silently, growing greyer minute by minute and feebler.  I did not want to watch, but go indoors where the lamps were lighted and it was warm and cosy.  I used to cry dreadfully, when I could get away by myself where Aunt Felicia and the maids could not see me, cry for my father—­he resigned the Commissionership, you know, when I was sent home and took service in Afghanistan under the Ameer—­and for my darling friend, Mrs. Pereira, and for the Sultan-i-bagh, where I knew strangers lived now.  For the lotus tank and orange grove, and all my little tame animals and my pretty play-places I should never, never see any more”—­

Overcome by which intimate memories, Damaris’ grave voice—­which had taken on a chanting cadence, at once novel and singularly pleasing to the young man’s ear—­quavered and broke.

“Poor little exiled princess!” he cried, all his facile kindness to the fore again.  “Yes, it must have been cruelly hard on you.  You must have suffered.  No wonder you cried—­cried buckets full.”