she did not believe for an instant.  Damaris had excellent health.  The maids exaggerated.  They delighted in making mysteries.  Uneducated persons are always absurdly greedy of disaster, lugubriously credulous.—­Yes, on the whole she concluded to maintain her original attitude, the attitude of yesterday and this morning; concluded it would be more telling to keep up the fiction of disgrace—­because—­Theresa did not care to scrutinize her own motives or analyse her own thought too closely.  She was afraid, and she was jealous—­jealous of Damaris’ beauty, of the great love borne her by her father, jealous of the fact that a young man—­hadn’t she, Theresa, seen the young sea-captain once or twice in the village recently and been fluttered by his notable good looks?—­had rescued the girl, and carried her home, carried her up here across the landing and along the familiar schoolroom passage, with its patterned Chinese wall-paper, gently and carefully, in his arms.

And these qualifying terms—­gentle and careful—­rankled to the point even of physical disturbance, so that Miss Bilson again became guilty of inelegantly choking, and clearing her throat for the second time with a foolish crowing sound.

“I will postpone my interview with Miss Damaris until after breakfast to-morrow,” she said, thus leaving Mary Fisher virtually, if not admittedly, master of the field.

But long before breakfast time, in the grey and mournful autumn morning, Patch rattled the dog-cart the seven miles into Stourmouth, as fast as the black horse could travel, to fetch Damaris’ old friend, the retired Indian Civil surgeon, Dr. McCabe.  For, coming to herself, in the intervals of distracted fever dreams, she had asked for him, going back by instinct to the comfort of his care of her in childish illnesses long ago.  Since she was ill enough, so Mary said, to need a doctor, let it be him.

“Not Mr. Cripps out of the village, or Dr. Risdon from Marychurch.  I won’t see them.  I will not see anyone from near here.  Keep them away from me,” she commanded.  “I know Miss Bilson will try to send for one or the other.  But I won’t see either.  Promise you’ll keep them away.”

When, after his visit, Theresa Bilson, considerably flustered and offended, found McCabe breakfasting in the dining-room and offered profuse apologies for the inconvenience to which he must have been put by so early and unnecessary a call, the tender-hearted and garrulous, but choleric Irishman cut her uncommonly short.

“And would you be supposing then, that if the dear blessed child should be desirous of consulting me I wouldn’t have rejoiced to come to her a thousand times as early and from ten thousand times as far?” he enquired, between large mouthfuls of kidney and fried bacon.  “The scheming little pudding-faced governess creature, with a cherry nose and an envious eye to her”—­he commented to himself.

“But you do not apprehend anything serious?” Theresa said stiffly—­“Merely a slight chill?”