conduct were liable to run in terms of the heart.  Had Theresa, poor thing, by chance formed a hopeless attachment?—­Hopeless, of course, almost ludicrously so; yet what more natural, more comprehensible, Charles being who and what he was?  Not that he would, in the faintest degree, lend himself to such misplaced affection.  Of that he was incapable.  The bare idea was grotesque.  He, of course, was guiltless.  But, assuming there was a feeling on Theresa’s side, wasn’t she equally guiltless?  She could not help being fascinated.—­Thus Miss Felicia was bound to acquit both.  Alike they left the court without a stain on their respective characters.

Not for worlds would she ever dream of worrying Charles by attempting to reintroduce poor Theresa to his notice.  But with Damaris it was different.  The idea that any persons of her acquaintance were at sixes and sevens, on bad terms, when, with a little good will on their part and tactful effort upon hers, they might be on pleasant ones was to her actively afflicting.  To drop an old friend, or even one not conspicuously friendly if bound to you by associations and habit, appeared to her an offence against corporate humanity, an actual however fractional lowering of the temperature of universal charity.  The loss to one was a loss to all—­in some sort.  Therefore did she run to adjust, to smooth, to palliate.

Charles was away—­it so neatly happened—­and Theresa Bilson here, not, it must be owned, altogether without Miss Felicia’s connivance.  If darling Damaris still was possessed of a hatchet she must clearly be given, this opportunity to bury it.  To have that weapon safe underground would be, from every point of view, so very much nicer.

At this point in her meditations beneath the trees bordering the carriage drive, their bare tops swaying in the breeze and bright sunshine, Miss Felicia fell to contrasting the present exhilarating morning with that dismally rainy one, just over three years ago, when—­regardless of her sister, Mrs. Cowden’s remonstrances—­she had come here from Paulton Lacy in response to Theresa’s signals of distress.  Just at the elbow of the drive, so she remembered, she had met a quite astonishingly good-looking young man, brown-gold bearded, his sou’wester and oilskins shining with wet.  She vaguely recalled some talk about him with her brother, Sir Charles, afterwards during luncheon.—­What was it?—­Oh! yes, of course, it was he who had rescued Damaris when she was lost out on the Bar, and brought her home down the tide-river by boat.  She had often wanted to know more about him, for he struck her at the time as quite out of the common, quite remarkably attractive.  But on the only occasion since when she had mentioned the subject, Damaris drew in her horns and became curiously uncommunicative.  It was all connected, of course, with the dear girl’s illness and the disagreeable episode of Theresa’s dismissal.—­How all the more satisfactory, then, that the Theresa business, in any case, was at this very hour in process of being set right!  Miss Felicia had advised Theresa how to act—­to speak to Damaris quite naturally and affectionately, taking her good-will for granted.  Damaris would be charming to her, she felt convinced.