“Ah! but you and Aunt Felicia did stay,” she repeated, her hands still rather tremulously busy with coffee-pot and milk jug.  “You were faithful and I no better than a shirker.  I fell through, miserably lost myself, which was selfish, contemptible.  I am ashamed.  Only I was so startled.  I never really knew before such—­such things could be.—­Forgive me, Colonel Sahib.  I have been to Aunt Felicia and asked her forgiveness already.—­And don’t think too meanly of me, please.  The shirking is over and done with for always.  You may trust me it never will happen again—­my losing myself as I did last night, I mean.”

In making this appeal for leniency, her eyes met Carteret’s fairly for the first time; and he read in them, not without admiration and a twinge of pain, both the height of her new-born, determined valour and the depth of her established distress.

“You needn’t tell me that, you needn’t tell me that, dear witch,” he answered quickly.  “I was sure of it all along.  I knew it was just a phase which would have no second edition.  So put any question of shame or need of forgiveness out of your precious head.  You were rushed up against circumstances, against a revelation, calculated to stagger the most seasoned campaigner.  You did not shirk; but it took you a little time to get your bearings.  That was all.  Don’t vex your sweet soul with quite superfluous reproaches.—­Sugar?  Yes, and plenty of it I am afraid.—­But you, too, must eat.”

And on her making some show of repugnance—­

“See here, we can’t afford to despise the day of small things, of minor aids to efficiency, dearest witch,” he wisely admonished her.

Whereupon, emulous to please him, bending her will to his, Damaris humbled herself to consumption of a portion of the contents of the chafing-dishes aforesaid.  To discover that, granted a healthy subject, sorrow queerly breeds hunger, the initial distaste for food—­in the main a sentimental one—­once surmounted.

Later McCabe joined them.  Recognized Damaris’ attitude of valour, and inwardly applauded it, although himself in woeful state.  For he was hard hit, badly upset.  Conscious of waste of tissue, he set about to restore it without apology or hesitation, trouble putting an edge to appetite in his case also, and that of formidable keenness.  Bitterly he grieved, since bearing the patient, he feared very certainly to lose, an uncommon affection.  He loved Charles Verity; while, from the worldly standpoint, his dealings with The Hard meant very much to him—­made for glory, a feather in his cap visible to all and envied by many.  Minus the fine flourish of it his position sank to obscurity.  As a whist-playing, golf-playing, club-haunting, Anglo-Indian ex-civil surgeon—­and Irishman at that—­living in lodgings at Stourmouth, he commanded meagre consideration.  But as chosen medical-attendant and, in some sort, retainer of Sir Charles Verity he ranked.  The county came within his purview.  Thanks to this connection with The Hard he, on occasion, rubbed shoulders with the locally great.  Hence genuine grief for his friend was black-bordered by the prospect of impending social and mundane loss.  The future frowned on him, view it in what terms he might.  To use his own unspoken phrase, he felt “in hellishly low water.”