But to keep this in mind, to remember it all the time, while imagination galloped with fever brought on by chill and exposure, and reason wandered, losing touch with plain commonsense through the moral shock she had sustained, was difficult to the point of impossibility.  She needed a witness, visible and material, to the fact of those former happier conditions; and found it, quaintly enough, in the untidy person and humorous, quarrelsome, brick-dust coloured face—­as much of the said face, that is, as was discoverable under the thick stiff growth of sandy hair surrounding and invading it—­of the Irish doctor, as he sat by her bed, ministered to and soothed her with reverent and whimsical delicacy.

As long as he was there, her room retained its normal, pleasant and dainty aspect.  All Damaris’ little personal effects and treasures adorning dressing and writing-tables, the photographs and ornaments upon the mantelshelf, her books, the prints and pictures upon the walls—­even the white dimity curtains and covers, trellised with small faded pink and blue roses—­seemed to smile upon her, kindly and confiding.  They wanted to be nice, to console and encourage her—­McCabe holding them in place and in active good-will towards her, somehow, with his large freckled, hairy-backed hands.  But let him go from the room, let him leave her, and they turned wicked, behaving as they had behaved throughout the past rather dreadful night and adding to the general chaos by tormenting tricks and distortions of their own.

The beloved photographs of her father, in particular, were cruel.  They grew inordinately large, stepped out of their frames, and stalked to and fro in troops and companies.  The charcoal drawing of him—­done last year by that fine artist, James Colthurst, as a study for the portrait he was to paint—­hanging between the two western windows, at right angles to her bed where she could always see it, proved the worst offender.  It did not take the floor, it is true, but remained in its frame upon the wall.  Yet it too came alive, and looked full at her, compelling her attention, dominating, commanding her; while, slowly, deliberately it changed, the features slightly losing their accentuation, growing youthful, softer in outline, the long drooping moustache giving place to a close-cut beard.  The eyes alone stayed the same, steady, luminous, a living silence in them at once formidable and strangely sad.  Finally—­and this the poor child found indescribably agitating and even horrible—­their silence was broken by a question.  For they asked what she, Damaris, meant to say, meant to do, when he—­her father, the all-powerful Commissioner Sahib of her babyhood’s faith and devotion—­came home here, came back?

Yet whose eyes, after all, were they which thus asked?  Was it not, rather the younger man, the bearded one, who claimed, and of right, an answer to that question?  And upon Damaris it now dawned that these two, distinct yet interchangeable personalities—­imprisoned, as by some evil magic in one picture—­were in opposition, in violent and impious conflict, which conflict she was called upon, yet was powerless, to avert or to assuage.