“Oh, no!—­go on—­please, go on,” she brokenly prayed him.

So he told her, further, how at Singapore, the outward voyage at last ended, he was tempted to desert; or, better still, put an end, once and for all, to the whole black business of living.  And how, meditating on the methods of such drastic deliverance—­sitting in the palm-shaded verandah of a fly-blown little eating-house, kept by a monkey-faced, squint-eyed Japanese—­he happened to pick up a Calcutta newspaper.  He read its columns mechanically, without interest or understanding, his mind still working on methods of death, when a name leapt at him weighted with personal meaning.

“It hit me,” Faircloth said, “full between the eyes, knocking the cry-baby stuff out of me, and knocking stuff of very different order in.  For I wanted something stronger than mother-love—­precious though that is—­to brace me up and put some spunk into me just then.—­Sir Charles was campaigning in Afghanistan, and this Calcutta paper sang his praises to a rousing tune.  Lamented the loss of him to the Indian Government, and the lack of appreciation and support of him at home which induced him to take foreign service.  Can’t you imagine how all this about a great soldier, whose blood after all ran in my veins, pulled me clean up out of the slime, where suicide tempted the soft side of me, into another world?—­A sane world, in which a man can make good, if only he’s pluck to hold on.—­Yes, he saved me; or at all events roused the spirit in me which makes for salvation, and which that drunken brute had almost killed.  But, because I was only a boy as yet, with a boy’s queer instincts and extravagancies, I made the monkey-faced, Japanese eating-house keeper—­who added artistic tattooing to other and less reputable ways of piling up a fortune—­fix the sea-bird, for faith in my profession—­and those three initials of my own name and a name not altogether my own, right here.—­Fix them for remembrance and for a warning of which I could never get free.  Always I should be forced to see it.  And others must see it too.  Through it my identity—­short of mutilation—­was indestructibly established.  From that identity, henceforward, there wasn’t any possible running away.”

Faircloth had ended on a note of exultation, calmly sounded yet profound.

And upon that final note Damaris dwelt now, sitting on the chintz-covered window-seat of the room which Carteret would to-night inhabit.  She went through the cruel story again, while the transparent twilight drew its elfin veil over all things, outdoor and in.

The crescent moon, a slender, upright wisp of a thing, climbed the southern sky.  And Damaris’ soul was strangely satisfied, for the story, if cruel, was one of restitution and the healing of a wrong.  To her father—­his father—­the boy had turned in that bad hour, which very perfectly made for peace between them.  The curve of her duty to the one, as she now apprehended, in nowise