“You have heard about my being out on the Bar and—­and all that?”

“Yes,” he said, “I have heard.”

“Captain Faircloth, who found me and brought me home, told me something.”

Damaris’ voice broke into tones of imploring tenderness.

“I love you, Commissioner Sahib, you know how I love you—­but—­but is what Captain Faircloth told me true?”

Whereupon temptation surged up anew, inviting, inciting Charles Verity to lie—­dressing up that lie in the cloak of most excellent charity, of veritable duty towards Damaris’ fine courage and her precious innocence.  And he hedged, keeping open, if only for a few minutes longer, the way of escape.

“How can I answer until I know what he did tell you?” he took her up, at last, almost coldly.

“That he is your son—­is my brother,” Damaris said.

Even at this pass, Charles Verity waited before finally committing himself, thereby unwittingly giving sentiment—­in the shape of the Powers of the Air—­the chance to take a rather unfairly extensive hand in the game.

For while he thus waited, he could not but be aware, through the tense silence otherwise reigning in the room, of the tap and scratch of the rose-spray upon the window-panes; of the swish of the moist gusty wind sweeping from across the salt-marsh and mud-flats of the Haven—­from the black cottages, too, beyond the warren, gathered, as somewhat sinister boon companions, about the bleak, grey stone-built Inn.  And this served to transfix his consciousness with visions of what once had been—­he knowing so exactly how it would all sound, all look out there, the wistful desolation, the penetrating appeal bred of the inherent sadness of the place on a wild autumn night such as this.

“Yes,” he said at last, and putting a great constraint upon himself he spoke calmly, without sign of emotion.  “What the young man told is true, Damaris, perfectly true.”

“I—­I thought so,” she answered back, gravely.  “Though I didn’t understand”—­And, after a moment’s pause, with a certain hopelessness of resignation—­“Though I don’t understand even now.”

In her utterance Charles Verity so distinctly heard the last words of the—­to him—­dying child, that, smitten with raging bitterness of grief and of regret, he said: 

“Nevertheless it is, in my opinion, disgraceful, abominable, that he should have made the occasion, or, to put the matter at its best, have taken advantage of the occasion, when you were alone and, in a sense, at his mercy, to tell you this most unhappy thing.”

“No, no,” Damaris cried, in her generous eagerness catching back the curtain and looking at him nobly unselfconscious, nobly zealous to defend and to set right.  “You mustn’t think that.  He didn’t start with any intention of telling me.  He fancied I might have lost my way among the sand-hills, that I might be frightened or get some harm, and so came straight to look for me, and take care of me.  He was very beautifully kind; and I felt beautifully safe with him—­safe in the same way I feel safe with you, almost.”