Still he put her off awhile as to the exact announcement, smiling upon her in fond, yet stately approval.

“Let the telling keep until after dinner, my dear,” he bade her.  “Pacify the cravings of the natural man for food and drink.  The day has been fertile in demands—­strenuous indeed to the point of fatigue.  So let us comfort ourselves inwardly and materially before we affront weighty decisions.”

He kissed her cheek.

“By the way, though, does it ever occur to you to think of the Bhutpur Sultan-i-bagh and wish to go East again?”

And Damaris, with still uplifted chin, surveyed him gravely and with a certain wistfulness, Miss Felicia’s attempted poaching forgotten and an impression of Faircloth vividly overtaking her.  For they were so intimately, disturbingly alike, the father and the son, in voice as well as in build and feature.

“Go East?” she said, Faircloth’s declared preference for sailing into the sunrise present to her.  “Why, I go East in my dreams nearly every night.  I love it—­love it more rather than less as I grow older.  Of course I wish to go—­some day.  But that’s by the way, Commissioner Sahib.  All that I really want, now, at once, is to go wherever you go, stay wherever you stay.  You won’t ask me to agree to any plan which parts us, will you?—­which takes you away from me?”

“Ruth to a strange Naomi, my dear,” he answered.  “But so be it.  I desire nothing better than to have you always with me.—­But I will not keep you on tenter-hooks as to your and my projected destination.  Let them bring in dinner in half an hour.  Carteret and I shall be ready.  Meanwhile, read this—­agreeing to relegate discussion of it to a less hungry season.”

And taking the letter she had forwarded to him yesterday, bearing the imprint of the Indian Office, from the breast pocket of his shooting coat, he put it into her hand.

The appointment—­namely, that of Lieutenant-Governor of an Indian presidency famous in modern history, a cradle of great reputations and great men, of English names to conjure with while our Eastern Empire endures—­was offered, in terms complimentary above those common to official communications.  Sir Charles Verity’s expert knowledge, not only of the said mighty province but of the turbulent kingdom lying beyond its frontiers, marked him as peculiarly fitted for the post.  A campaign against that same turbulent kingdom had but recently been brought to a victorious conclusion.  His influence, it was felt, might be of supreme value at this juncture in the maintenance of good relations, and consolidation of permanent peace.

Damaris’ heart glowed within her as she read the courteous praiseful sentences.  Even more than through the well-merited success of his book, did her father thus obtain and come into the fullness of his own at last.  Her imagination glowed, too, calling up pictures of the half-remembered, half-fabulous oriental scene.  The romance of English rule in India, the romance of India itself, its variety, its complexity, the multitude of its gods, the multitude of its peoples, hung before her as a mirage, prodigal in marvels, reaching back and linking up through the centuries with the hidden wisdom, the hidden terror of the Ancient of Days.