and her relation.  Though little enough—­too little, so said some of his critics—­hampered by fear in any department, he consciously dreaded the smallest modification of that relation.  Among the many dissatisfactions and bitternesses of life, it shone forth with a steady light of purity and sweetness, as a thing unspoiled, unbreathed on, even, by what is ignoble or base.  And not the surface of it alone was thus free from all breath of defilement.  It showed clear right through, as some gem of the purest water.  To keep it thus inviolate, he had made sacrifices in the past neither easy nor inconsiderable to a man of his temperament and ambitions.  Hence that its perfection should be now endangered was to him the more exquisitely hateful.

Upon the altar of that hatred, promptly without scruple he sacrificed the wretched Theresa.  Most of us are so constituted that, at a certain pass, pleasure—­of a sort—­is to be derived from witnessing the anguish of a fellow creature.  In all save the grossly degenerate that pleasure, however, is short-lived.  Reflection follows, in which we cut to ourselves but a sorry figure.  With Charles Verity, reflection began to follow before he had spent many minutes in Damaris’ sick-room.  For here the atmosphere was, at once, grave and tender, beautifully honest in its innocence of the things of the flesh.—­The woman had been inconceivably foolish, from every point of view.  If she had known, good heavens, if she had only known!  But he inclined now to the more merciful view that, veritably, she didn’t know; that her practical, even her theoretic, knowledge was insufficient for her to have had any clear design.  It was just a blind push of starved animal instinct.  Of course she must go.  Her remaining in the house was in every way unpermissible; still he need not, perhaps, have been so cold-bloodedly precipitate with her.

Anyhow the thing was done—­it was done—­He raised his shoulders and making with his hands a graphic gesture of dismissal, let his chin drop on to his breast again.

For the East had left its mark on his attitude towards women with one exception—­that of his daughter—­Charles Verity, like most men, not requiring of himself to be too rigidly consistent.  Hence Theresa, and all which pertained to her, even her follies, appeared to him of contemptibly small moment compared with the developments for which those follies might be held accidentally responsible.  His mind returned to that main theme painfully.  He envisaged it in all its bearings, not sparing himself.  Suffered, and looked on at his own suffering with a stoicism somewhat sardonic.

Meanwhile Damaris slept.  His nearness had not disturbed her, indeed he might rather suppose its effect beneficent.  For her breathing grew even, just sweetly and restfully audible in the intervals of other sounds reaching him from out of doors.

The wind, drawing out of the sunset, freshened during the night.  Now it blew wet and gustily from south-west, sighing through the pines and Scotch firs in the Wilderness.  A strand of the yellow Banksia rose, trained against the house wall, breaking loose, scratched and tapped at the window-panes with anxious appealing little noises.