“No—­there indeed you are mistaken, dearest,” she gently yet confidently asserted.  “You take the whole business topsy-turvy fashion, quite wrong way round.  I won’t weary you with explanations of exactly what led to Darcy Faircloth coming here with me on Sunday.  But you ought to know that he and Aunt Felicia met.  I hadn’t planned that.  It just happened.  And she was lovely to him—­lovely to us both.  She made him stay to luncheon—­inviting him in your name.”

“I seem to possess a singular gift for saddling my relations with the payment of my bad debts,” Charles Verity remarked.

“But there isn’t any bad debt—­that’s what I so dearly want you to believe, what I’m trying so hard, Commissioner Sahib, to tell you,” Damaris cried.  “Afterwards, when he and I were alone by ourselves, the ice broke somehow, he gave himself away and said beautiful things—­things about you which made me delightfully happy, and showed how he has felt towards you all along.”

Simply, without picking of her words, hesitation or artifice, Damaris repeated that somewhat sinister tale of the sea.  Of a sailing ship, becalmed through burning days and stifling nights in tropic waters.  Of the ill-doings of a brutal, drunken captain.  Of a fly-blown eating-house in Singapore.  Of the spiritual deliverance there achieved through sight of Charles Verity’s name and successful record in the columns of a Calcutta newspaper; and the boy’s resultant demand for the infliction of some outward and visible sign, some inalienable stigmata, which should bear perpetual witness to the fact of his parentage.

“So you see”—­

Damaris kindled, standing before him, flamed indeed to a rare carelessness of convention, of enjoined pruderies and secrecies.—­

“You gave him the beautiful gift of life to begin with; and saved his life later when he was so miserably tempted to end it.  As he loves life, where then is the debt?—­Not on your side certainly, dearest.”

Listening to which fondly exalted sophistries—­for sophistries from worldly and moral standpoint alike must he not surely pronounce them?—­Charles Verity still received comfort to his soul.  They ought to be reckoned mistaken, of course, transparently in error, yet neither son nor daughter condemned him.  Neither did his sister, in the pathetic innocence and purity of her middle-age maidenhood.

This moved him to thankfulness, none the less genuine because shot with self-mockery.  For he was curious to observe how, as the last urgings of ambition and thirst of power fell away from him,—­he riding under escort of Death, the black captain—­all tributes of human tenderness and approval gained in value.—­Not the approval of notable personages, of those high in office, nor even that of sympathetic critics and readers; but of persons in his own immediate voisinage, bound to him by friendship, by association, or the tie of blood.—­Their good-will was precious to him as never before.  He craved to