She had judged and condemned Theresa pretty roundly it is true, nevertheless she felt a little hurt and sore at the latter’s treatment of her.  Theresa need not have kept up the quarrel till the very last so acridly.  After all, as she was going out purely for own pleasure and amusement, she might have found something nice and civil to say at parting.  And then the mere fact of being left behind, of being out of it, however limited the charms of a party, has a certain small stab to it somehow—­as most persons, probing youthful experiences, can testify.  It is never quite pleasant to be the one who doesn’t go!—­The house, moreover, when her father was absent, always reminded Damaris of an empty shrine, a place which had lost its meaning and purpose.  To-day, though windows and doors were wide open letting in a wealth of sunshine, it appeared startlingly lifeless and void.  The maids seemed unusually quiet.  She heard no movement on the staircase or in the rooms above.  Neither gardener nor garden-boy was visible.  She would have hailed the whirr of the mowing machine or swish of a broom on the lawn.—­Oh! if only her poor dear Nannie were still alive, safe upstairs, there in the old nursery!

And at that the child Damaris felt a lump rise in her throat.  But the girl, the soon-to-be woman, Damaris choked it down bravely.  For nobody, nothing—­so she assured herself, going back to the lesson learned yesterday upon the open moorland—­is really inevitable unless you suffer or will it so to be.  Wherefore she stiffened herself against recognition of loneliness, stiffened herself against inclination to mourning, refused to acquiesce in or be subjugated by either and, to the better forgetting of them, sought consolation among her great-great uncle’s books.

For at this period Damaris was an omnivorous reader, eager for every form of literature and every description of knowledge—­whether clearly comprehended or not—­which the beloved printed page has to give.  An eagerness, it may be noted, not infrequently productive of collisions with Theresa, and at this particular juncture all the more agreeable to gratify on that very account.  For Theresa would have had her walk only in the narrow, sheltered, neatly bordered paths of history and fiction designed, for the greater preservation of female innocence, by such authors as Miss Sewell, Miss Strickland, and Miss Yonge.  Upon Damaris, however, perambulation of those paths palled too soon.  Her intellect and heart alike demanded wider fields of drama, of religion and of science, above all wider and less conventional converse with average human nature, than this triumvirate of Victorian sibyls was willing or capable to supply.  It is undeniable that, although words and phrases, whole episodes indeed, were obscure even unintelligible to her, she found the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini and Saint Simon more interesting than the “Lives of the Queens of England; Vathek,” more to her taste than “Amy Herbert”; and, if the