For he had stayed to luncheon yesterday.  A meal, to him in a sense sacred, as being the first eaten by him in his father’s house.  So graciously invited, how, indeed, could he do otherwise than stay?  And, the initial strangeness, the inherent wonder of that sacred character wearing off, he found voice and talked not without eloquence.  Talked of his proper element, the sea, gaining ease and self-possession from the magnitude and manifold enchantments of his theme.

To him, as to all true-born sailor-men—­so Damaris divined—­the world is made of water, with but accident of land.  Impeding, inconvenient accident at that, too often blocking the passage across or through, and constraining you to steer a foolishly, really quite inordinately divergent course.  Under this obstructive head the two Americas offend direfully, sprawling their united strength wellnigh from pole to pole.  The piercing of their central isthmus promised some mitigation of this impertinence of emergent matter; though whether in his, the speaker’s lifetime, remained—­so he took it—­open to doubt.  The “roaring forties,” and grim blizzard-ridden Fuegian Straits would long continue, as he feared, to bar the way to the Pacific.  Not that his personal fancy favoured West so much as East.  Not into the sunset but into the sunrising did he love to sail some goodly black-hulled ship.—­And as he talked, more especially at his mention of this eastward voyaging, those manifold enchantments of his calling stirred Damaris’ imagination, making her eyes bright as the fabled eyes of danger, and fathomless as well.

But the best came later.  For, Mary having served coffee, Miss Felicia, making an excuse of letters to be written, with pretty tact left them to themselves.  And Faircloth, returning after closing the door behind her fluttering, gently eager figure, paused behind Damaris’ chair.—­Jacobean, cane-panelled, with high-carved back and arms to it.  Thomas Clarkson Verity had unquestionably a nice taste in furniture.—­The young sea-captain rested his right hand on the dark terminal scroll-work, and bending down, laid his left hand upon Damaris’ hand, covering it as it lay on the white damask table-cloth.

“Have I done what I should, and left undone what I shouldn’t do, my dear and lovely sister?” he asked her, half-laughing and half-abashed.  “It’s a tricky business being here, you know—­to put it no higher than that.  And it might, with truth, be put far higher.  I get so horribly fearful of letting you down in any way—­however trivial—­before other people.  I balance on a knife-edge all the while.”

“Have no silly fears of that sort,” Damaris said quickly, a trifle distressed.

For it plucked at her sisterly pride in him that he should, even by implication, debase himself, noting inequality of station between himself and her.  She held the worldly aspects of the matter in contempt.  They angered her, so that she impulsively banished reserve.  Leaning forward, she bent her head, putting her lips to the image of the flying sea-bird—­which so intrigued her loving curiosity—­and those three letters tattooed in blue and crimson upon the back of his hand.