of eyes availed.  It had jumped out.  She stared at it, and, in all its undermining power of discouragement, it stared back.—­What if the deepest thing, the thing which alone lasted, the thing which, therefore, you were bound in the end to accept, to submit to, was just darkness, sorrow, loneliness of worn body and shrinking spirit, by the shore of a cold, dumb, and tenantless, limitless sea—­what then?

From which undesirable abyss of speculation she was aroused by the sound of her own name—­“Damaris Verity, hey—­Damaris Verity”—­shouted, not roughly though in tones of urgent command, from above and behind her on the crest of the Bar.  Along with it came the rattle of shifting shingle under a strong active tread.

Hearing which the young girl’s senses and faculties alike sprang to attention.  She rose from her dejected attitude, stood up and faced round, forgetful of aches and weariness and of woeful ultimate questionings, while in glad surprise her heart went out to meet and welcome the—­to her—­best beloved being in this, no longer, sorry world.

For even thus, at some fifty yards distant through the blur of falling rain, the figure presented to her gaze, in height, build, and fashion of moving, was delightfully familiar, as were the tones of the voice which had hailed her—­if in not quite equal degree the manner of that hail.  Some change in his plans must have taken place, or some letter miscarried advising her of her father’s earlier return.  Finding her out he had come to look for her.—­This was perfectly as it should be.  Had Colonel Carteret come home with him, she wondered.  And then there flashed through her, with a singular vividness, recollection of another, long, long ago escapade—­when as a still almost baby child she had stepped off alone, in daring experiment, and fallen asleep, in the open as to-day.  But in surroundings how amazingly different!—­A place of fountains, cypresses and palms, she curled up in a black marble chair, set throne fashion, upon a platform of blood red sandstone, an age-old Oriental garden outstretched below.  Colonel Carteret—­“the man with the blue eyes” as she always had called him—­awakened her, bringing an adorable and, as it proved in the sequel, a tragic birthday gift.—­Tragic because to it might, actually if indirectly, be traced the breaking up of her childhood’s home in the stately Indian pleasure palace of the Sultan-i-bagh at Bhutpur, her separation from her father and exile—­as she had counted it—­to Europe.

It is among the doubtful privileges of highly sensitized natures, such as Damaris’, that, in hours of crisis, vision and pre-vision go hand in hand.  As there flashed through her remembrance of that earlier sleep in the open, there flashed through her also conviction that history would still further repeat itself.  Now, as then, the incident of sleep preluded the receipt of a gift, adorable perhaps, yet freighted with far-reaching consequences to herself and her