Indirectly, mention of her beloved nurse, Sarah Watson—­who journeying back from a visit to her native Lancashire, just this time last year, had met death swift and hideous in a railway collision—­recalled to Damaris the little scene, of a week ago, with Tom Verity when ho had asked her, in the noonday sunshine out on the Bar, for some explanation of his strange nocturnal experience.  She went hot all over now, with exaggerated childish shame, thinking of it.  For had not she, Damaris Verity, though nurtured in the creed that courage is the source and mother of all virtues, shown the white feather, incontinently turned tail and run away?  Remembrance of that running scorched her, so that more than once, awakening suddenly in the night, her fair young body was dyed rose-red with the disgrace of it literally from head to heel.  She was bitterly humiliated by her own poltroonery, ingenuously doubtful as to whether she could ever quite recover her self-respect; glad that every day put two hundred miles and more of sea between her and Tom Verity, since he had witnessed that contemptible fall from grace.

Nevertheless, after her first consternation—­in which, to avoid further speech with him she had sought refuge among the unsavoury seine nets in the fore-part of Jennifer’s ferry-boat—­Tom Verity’s probable opinion of her undignified action troubled her far less than the cause of the said action itself.  For exactly what, after all, had so upset her, begetting imperative necessity of escape?  Not the apparent confirmation of that ugly legend concerning ghostly ponies driven up across The Hard garden from the shore.  From childhood, owing both to temperament and local influences, her apprehension of things unseen and super-normal had been remarkably acute.  From the dawn of conscious intelligence these had formed an integral element in the atmosphere of her life; and that without functional disturbance, moral or physical, of a neurotic sort.  She felt no morbid curiosity about such matters, did not care to dwell upon or talk of them.—­Few persons do who, being sane in mind and body, are yet endowed with the rather questionable blessing of the Seer’s sixth sense.—­For while, in never doubting their existence her reason acquiesced, her heart turned away, oppressed and disquieted, as from other mysterious actualities common enough to human observation, such as illness, disease, deformity, old age, the pains of birth and of death.  Such matters might perplex and sadden, or arouse her indignant pity; but, being strong with the confidence of untouched youth and innocence, they were powerless, in and by themselves, to terrify her to the contemptible extremity of headlong flight.