“Let Miss Damaris know I shall be glad to see her when she is free to come to me,” he said.

And here, although our damsel’s reputation for courage and resource may, thereby, sustain some damage, I am constrained to state that while in the sick-room Miss Felicia shone, Damaris gave off but a vacillating and ineffective light.

Imagination is by no means invariably beneficent.  The very liveliness of the perceptions which it engenders may intimidate and incapacitate.  Upon Damaris imagination practised this mischief.  Becoming, for the time, that upon which she looked, sharing every pang and even embroidering the context, she weakened, in some sort, to the level of the actual sufferer, helpless almost as he through the drench of overwhelming sympathy.  She had been taken, poor child, at so villainous a disadvantage.  Without preparation or warning—­save of the most casual and inadequate—­her humour wayward, she a trifle piqued, fancying her pretty clothes, her pretty looks, excited, both by the brilliant prospect presented by the Indian appointment and by her delicate passage of arms with Carteret, she was compelled of a sudden to witness the bodily torment of a human being, not only by her beloved beyond all others, but reverenced also.  The impression she received was of outrage, almost of blasphemy.  The cruelty of life lay uncovered, naked and open to her appalled and revolted consciousness.  She received a moral, in addition to a physical shock, utterly confounding in its crudity, its primitive violence.

The ravage of pain can be, in great measure, surmounted and concealed; but that baser thing, functional disturbance—­in this case present as heart spasm, threatening suffocation, with consequent agonized and uncontrollable struggle for breath—­defies concealment.  This manifestation horrified Damaris.  The more so that, being unacquainted with the sorry spectacle of disease, her father, under the deforming stress of it, appeared to her as a stranger almost—­inaccessible to affection, hideously removed from her and remote.  His person and character, to her distracted observation, were altered beyond recognition except during intervals, poignant to the verge of heart-break, when passing ease restored his habitual dignity and grace.

Thus, while Miss Felicia and Carteret—­with Hordle and Mary Fisher as assistants—­ministered to his needs in as far as ministration was possible, she stood aside, consumed by misery, voluntarily effacing herself.  Backed away even against the wall, out of range of the lamp-light, stricken, shuddering, and mute.  Upon Dr. McCabe’s arrival and assumption of command, Carteret, finding himself at liberty to note her piteous state, led her out into the passage and then to the long drawing-room, with gentle authority.  There for a half-hour or more—­to him sadly and strangely sweet—­he sat beside her, while the tears silently coursed down her cheeks, letting her poor proud head rest against his shoulder, his arm supporting her gracious young body still clothed in all the bravery of her flowered silken sunshine dress.