As Damaris paused, irradiated by the joy of welcome and of forebodings falsified, upon the lowest step of the staircase, Sir Charles turned aside and tenderly kissed her.

“My darling,” he said.

And Carteret, following him an instant later, took her by both hands and, from arm’s length, surveyed her in smiling admiration he made no effort to repress.

“Dear witch, this is unexpected good fortune.  I had little thought of seeing you so soon—­resplendent being that you are, veritably clothed with sunshine.”

“And with your pearls,” she gaily said.

“Ah! my poor pearls,” he took her up lightly.  “I am pleased they still find favour in your sight.  But aren’t you curious to learn what has made us desert our partridge shooting at an hour’s notice, granting the pretty little beggars unlooked-for length of life?”

His blue eyes laughed into hers.  There was a delightful atmosphere about him.  Something had happened to him surely—­for wasn’t he, after all, a young man even yet?

“Yes—­what—­what has brought you, Colonel Sahib?” Damaris laughed back at him, bubbling over with happy excitement.

“Miracles,” he answered.  “A purblind Government at last admits the error of its ways and proposes to make reparation for its neglect of a notable public-servant.”

“You?” she cried.

Carteret shook his head, still surveying her but with a soberer glance.

“No—­no—­not me.  In any case there isn’t any indebtedness to acknowledge—­no arrears to pay off.  I have my deserts.—­To a man immensely my superior.  Look nearer home, dear witch.”

He made a gesture in the direction of his host.

“My Commissioner Sahib?”

“Yes—­your Commissioner Sahib, who comes post haste to request your dear little permission, before accepting this tardy recognition of his services to the British Empire.”

“Ah! but that’s too much!” the girl said softly, glancing from one to the other, enchanted and abashed by the greatness of their loyalty to and prominent thought of her.

“Has this made him happy?” she asked Carteret, under her breath.  “He looks so, I think.  How good that this has come in time—­that it hasn’t come too late.”

For, in the midst of her joyful excitement, a shadow crossed Damaris’ mind oddly obscuring the light.  She suffered a perception things might so easily have turned out otherwise; a suspicion that, had the reparation of which Carteret spoke been delayed, even by a little, its beloved recipient would no longer have found use for or profit in it.  Damaris fought the black thought, as ungrateful and faithless.  To fear disaster is too often to invite it.

Just at this juncture Miss Felicia made hurried and gently eager irruption into the hall; and with that irruption the tone of prevailing sentiment declined upon the somewhat trivial, even though warmly affectionate.  For she fluttered round Sir Charles, as Mary Fisher helped divest him of his overcoat, in sympathetic overflowings of the simplest sort.—­“She had been reading and failed to hear the carriage, hence her tardy appearance.  Let him come into the drawing-room at once, out of these draughts.  There was a delightful wood fire and he must be chilled.  The drive down the valley was always so cold at night—­particularly where the road runs through the marsh lands by Lampit.”