leave him alone, would not let him rest.  Had she developed, since last he had converse with her, into a practised coquette?

“Look here, dear witch,” he said, making a return upon himself, and manfully withstanding the sweet provocation of her near neighbourhood.  “We seem to be queerly at cross purposes.  I can’t pretend to follow the turnings and doublings of your ingenious mind.  I gather there is something you want of me.  To be plain, then, what is it?”

“That—­that you shouldn’t desert me—­desert us—­in this crisis.  You have never deserted me before—­never since I can first remember.”

“I desert you—­good Lord!” Carteret exclaimed, his hands dropping at his sides with an odd sort of helplessness.

“Ah! that’s asking too much, I suppose,” she said.  “I’m selfish even to think of it.  Yet how can I do otherwise?  Don’t you understand how all difficulties would vanish, and how beautifully simple and easy everything would be if you coached me—­if you, dear Colonel Sahib, went with us?”

The man with the blue eyes looked down at the tiger skin again, his countenance strained and blanched.

More than ever did he find her humour baffling.  Not once nor twice had he, putting force upon himself, resisted the temptation to woo her—­witness his retirement from St. Augustin and his determined abstinence from intercourse with her since.  But now, so it might veritably appear, the positions were reversed and she wooed him.  Though whether pushed to that length merely by wayward fancy, by some transient skittish influence or frolic in the blood, or by realized design he had no means of judging.—­Well, he had bidden her be plain, and she, in some sort at least, obeyed him.  It behooved him, therefore, to be plain in return, in as far as a straightforward reading of her meaning would carry.

“So you think all would be simple and easy were I to go with you and your father?” he said, both speech and manner tempered to gentleness.  “I am glad to have you think so—­should be still more glad could I share your belief.  But I know better, dearest witch—­know that you are mistaken.  This is no case of desertion—­put that out of your precious mind once and for all—­but of discretion.  My being in attendance, far from simplifying, would embroil and distort your position.  An elderly gentleman perpetually trotting”—­

“Don’t,” Damaris cried, holding up both hands in hot repudiation.  “Don’t say that.  There’s distortion if you like!  It’s ugly—­I won’t have it, for it is not true.”

In the obvious sincerity of which denunciation Carteret found balm; yet adhered to his purpose.

“But it is true, alas; and I therefore repeat it both for your admonition and my own.  For an elderly gentleman trotting at a young girl’s heels is a most unedifying spectacle—­giving occasion, and reasonably, to the enemy to blaspheme—­bad for her in numberless ways; and, if he’s any remnant of self-respect left in him, is anything better than a fatuous dotard, damnably bad for him as well.  Do you understand?”