“Yes, but—­as I told your Aunt Felicia—­since then I have tried more than ever to win your entire confidence, to make up to you for the loss of poor Watson and fill her place with you.”

“No one else can ever fill the place of the person one has loved,” Damaris returned indignantly.  “It isn’t possible.  I should be ashamed to let it be possible.  Nannie was Nannie—­she had cared for me all my life and I had cared for her.  She belongs to things about which you”—­

And there the girl checked herself, aware of something almost ludicrously pitiful in the smug tearful countenance and stumpy would-be fashionable figure.  Hit a man your own size, or bigger, by all means if you are game to take the consequences.  But to smite a creature conspicuously your inferior in fortune—­past, present, and prospective—­is unchivalrous, not to say downright mean-spirited.  So Damaris, swiftly repentant, put her arm round the heaving shoulders, bent her handsome young head and kissed the uninvitingly dabby cheek—­a caress surely counting to her for righteousness.

“Don’t find fault with me any more, Billy,” she said.  “Indeed I never hurt you on purpose.  But there are such loads of things to think about, that I get absorbed in them and can’t attend sometimes directly on the minute.”

“Absent-mindedness should be corrected rather than encouraged,” Miss Bilson announced, sententious even amid her tears.

“Oh! it amounts to more than absent-mindedness I’m afraid—­a sort of absent-every-thingedness when it overtakes me.  For the whole of me seems to go away and away, hand in hand and all together,” Damaris said, her eyes alight with questions and with dreams.  “But don’t let us discuss that now,” she added.  “It would waste time, and it is you who must go away and away, Billy, if you are not to put the poor Miss Minetts into a frantic fuss by being late for tea.  They will think some accident has happened to you.  Don’t beep them in suspense, it is simply barbarous.—­Good-bye, and don’t hurry back.  I have heaps to amuse me.  I’ll not expect you till dinner-time.”

Thus did it come about that Damaris reposed in a deck chair, under the shade of the great ilex trees, gazing idly at the webs of steamer smoke hanging low in the southern sky, at the long yellow-grey ridge of the Bar between river and sea, and at the cormorants posturing in the hot afternoon sunshine upon the sand.

Truly she was free to send forth her soul upon whatever far fantastic journey she pleased.  But souls are perverse, not to be driven at will, choosing their own times and seasons for travel.  And hers, just now, proved obstinately home-staying—­had no wings wherewith to fly, but must needs crawl a-fourfoot, around all manner of inglorious personal matters.  For that skirmish with her ex-governess, though she successfully bridled her tongue and conquered by kindness rather than by smiting, had clouded her inward serenity, not only by its inherent uselessness, but by reminding her indirectly of an occurrence which it was her earnest desire to forget.