times by how narrow a squeak!  If that fine parental fraud, the Archdeacon, had but known!—­Tom, undeterred by the solemnity of the occasion, hunched up his shoulders like a naughty boy expecting his ears boxed.—­But then—­thank the powers, the Archdeacon so blessedly and refreshingly didn’t, and, what was more, didn’t in the very least want to know.  He never asked for trouble; but, like the priest and Levite of sacred parable, carefully passed by on the other side when trouble was about.

Our young friend looked again at Damaris.  Yes—­she had beauty and in the grand manner, standing there at the foot of the open brick-lined grave, calm, immobile, black-clad, white-faced, in the encircling melancholy of the drizzling mist.  With the family grouped about her, large-boned, pompous, well-fed persons, impervious to general ideas as they were imperviously prosperous, he compared her to a strayed deer amongst a herd of store cattle.  Really, with the exception of his cousin Felicia and—­naturally—­of himself, the Verity breed was almost indecently true to type.  Prize animals, most of them, he granted, still cattle—­for didn’t he detect an underlying trace of obstinate bovine ferocity in their collective aspect?

Damaris’ calm and immobility exceeded theirs.  But in quality and source how far removed, how sensitive and intelligent!  Her mourning was in the grand manner, too, her grief sincere and absolute to the extent of a splendid self-forgetfulness.  She didn’t need to pose; for that forgotten self could be trusted—­in another acceptation of the phrase—­never to forget itself.

And here Tom Verity’s agreeable frivolity, the astute and witty shiftiness of mind and—­in a degree—­of practice, for which he so readily found excuses and forgave himself, made place for nobler apprehensions.  Not merely Damaris’, just now, rather tragic beauty moved and impressed him; but some quality inherent in her upon which he felt disposed to confer the title of genius.  That was going far.—­Mentally he pulled himself up short.—­For wasn’t it going altogether too far—­absurdly so?  What the dickens did this excessive admiration portend?  Could he have received the coup de foudre?—­He had to-day a fancy for French tags, in reaction from the family’s over-powering Englishness.—­That wouldn’t suit his book in the very least.  For in the matters of the affections he held it thriftless, to the confines of sheer lunacy, to put all your eggs into one basket.  He, therefore, politicly abstained from further observation of Damaris; and, with engaging assiduity, reapplied himself to herding the two native gentlemen through the remainder of the ceremony and, at the conclusion of it, into the mildewed luxury of a Marychurch landau.