Damaris presented a mutinous countenance.  She would have had much ado to explain her own motives during this ten minutes’ conference.  If her mental—­or were they not rather mainly emotional?—­turnings and doublings proved baffling to her companion, they proved baffling to herself in an almost greater degree.  Things in general seemed to have gone into the melting-pot.  So many events had taken place, so many more been preshadowed, so many strains of feeling excited!  And these were confusingly unrelated, or appeared to be so as yet.  Amongst the confusion of them she found no sure foothold, still less any highway along which to travel in confidence and security.  Her thought ran wild.  Her intentions ran with it, changing their colour chameleon-like from minute to minute.  Now she was tempted to make an equivocal rejoinder.

“To understand,” she said, “is not always, Colonel Sahib, necessarily to agree.”

“I am satisfied with understanding and don’t press for agreement,” he answered, and on an easier note—­“since to me it is glaringly evident you should take this fine flight unhandicapped.  My duty is to stand aside and leave you absolutely free—­not because I enjoy standing aside, but”—­he would allow sentiment such meagre indulgence—­“just exactly because I do not.”

Here for the second time, at the crucial moment, Felicia Verity made irruption upon the scene.  But though her entrance was hurried, it differed fundamentally from that earlier one; so that both the man and the girl, standing in the proximity of their intimate colloquy before the fire, were sensible of and arrested by it.  She was self-forgetful, self-possessed, the exalted touch of a pure devotion upon her.

“I have been with my brother Charles,” she began, addressing them both.  “I happened to see Hordle coming from the library—­and I put off dinner.  I thought, darling”—­this to Damaris, with a becoming hint of deference—­“I might do so.  I gathered that Charles—­that your father—­wished it.  He has not been feeling well.”

And as Damaris anxiously exclaimed—­

“Yes”—­Miss Felicia went on—­“not at all well.  Hordle told me.  That was why I went to the library.  He hoped, if he waited and rested for a little while, the uncomfortable sensations might subside and it would be needless to mention them.  He did not want any fuss made.  We gave him restoratives, and he recovered from the faintness.  But he won’t be equal, he admits, to coming in to dinner.  Colonel Carteret must be hungry—­your father begs us to wait no longer, I assured him we would not.  Hordle is with him.  He should not be alone, I think, while any pain continues.”

“Pain—­pain?” Damaris cried, her imagination rather horribly caught by the word.  “But is he hurt, has he had some accident?”

While Carteret asked tersely:  “Pain—­and where?”

“Here,” Felicia answered, laying her hand upon her left side over the heart.  She looked earnestly at Carteret as she spoke, conveying to him an alarm she sought to spare Damaris.