In her zeal of welcome Miss Verity was voluble to the point of inconsequence, not to say incoherence.  Questions poured from her.  She appeared agitated, quaintly self-conscious, so at least it occurred to Damaris.  Finally she addressed Carteret.

“And you too must be frozen,” she declared.  “How long it is since we met!  I have always been so unlucky in just missing you here!  Really I believe I have only seen you once since you and Charles stayed with us at Canton Magna.—­You were both on leave from India.  I dare not think how many years ago that is—­before this child”—­her candid eyes appealingly sought those of Damaris—­“before this child existed.  And you are so wonderfully unaltered.”

Colour dyed her thin face and rather scraggy neck.  Only the young should blush.  After forty such involuntary exhibitions of emotion are unattractive, questionably even pathetic.

“Really time has stood still with you—­it seems to me, Colonel Carteret.”

“Time has done better than stand still,” Damaris broke in, with a rather surprising imperiousness.  “It has beautifully run backwards—­lately.”

And our maiden, in her whispering gleaming dress, swept down from the step, swept past the sadly taken aback Miss Felicia, and joined her father.  She put her hand within his arm.

“Come and warm yourself—­come, dearest,” she said, gently drawing him onward into the long room, where from above the range of dark bookshelves, goggle-eyed, pearl-grey Chinese goblins and monsters, and oblique-eyed Chinese philosophers and saints looked mysteriously down through the warm mellow light.

Damaris was conscious of a singular inward turmoil.  For Miss Felicia’s speeches found small favour in her ears.  She resented this open claiming of Carteret as a member of the elder generation.  Still more resented her own relegation to the nullity of the prenatal state.  Reminiscences, in which she had neither lot nor part, left her cold.  Or, to be accurate, bred in her an intemperate heat, putting a match to jealousies which, till this instant, she had no knowledge of.  Touched by that match they flared to the confusion of charity and reverence.  Hence, impulsively, unscrupulously, yet with ingenious unkindness, she struck—­her tongue a sword—­to the wounding of poor Miss Felicia.  And she felt no necessity for apology.  She liked to be unkind.  She liked to strike.  Aunt Felicia should not have been so self-assertive, so tactless.  She had brought chastisement upon herself.  It wasn’t like her to behave thus.  Her enthusiasms abounded; but she possessed a delicate appreciation of relative positions.  She never poached.  This came perilously near poaching.—­And everything had danced to so inspiring a tune, the movement of it so delicious!  Now the evening was spoilt.  The first fine alacrity of it could not be recaptured—­which was all Aunt Felicia’s fault.—­No, for her unkindness Damaris felt no regret.