But that brightening of sunset disturbed Damaris, bringing her slowly awake.  For a time she lay watching, though but half consciously the tinted radiance as—­the trees now stirred by a little wind drawing out of the sunset—­it shifted and flitted over the white surfaces.  At first it pleased her idle fancy.  But presently distressed her, as too thin, too chill, too restlessly unsubstantial, the veriest chippering ghost of colour and of light.  It affected her with a desolating sadness as of failure; of great designs richly attempted but petering out into a pitiful nothingness; of love which aped and mimicked, being drained of all purpose and splendour of hot blood; of partings whose sorrow had lost its savour, yet which masqueraded in showy crape for a heart-break long grown stale and obsolete.

Her temperature rushed up; and she threw off the bedclothes, raising herself on her elbow, while the shafts of thin brightness wavered fitfully.  Through them she saw the photographs of her father step out of their frames again, and growing very tall and spare, stalk to and fro.  Other figures joined them—­those of women.  Her poor dear Nannie, in the plain quaker-grey cotton gown and black silk apron she used to wear, even through the breathless hot-weather days, at the Sultan-i-bagh long ago.  And Henrietta Pereira, too, composed and delicately sprightly, arrayed in full flounced muslins and fine laces with an exquisiteness of high feminine grace and refinement which had enthralled her baby soul and senses, and, which held her captive by their charm even yet.  A handsome, high-coloured full-breasted, Eurasian girl, whom she but dimly recollected, was there as well.  And with these another—­carrying very certainly no hint of things oriental about her—­an English woman and of the people, in dull homely clothing, grave of aspect and of bearing; yet behind whose statuesque and sternly patient beauty a great flame seemed to quiver, offering sharp enough contrast to the frail glintings of the rain-washed sunset amid which she, just now, moved.

At sight of the last comer, Damaris started up, tense with wonder and excitement, since she knew—­somehow—­this final visitant belonged not to the past so much as to the present, that her power was unexhausted and would go forward to the shaping of the coming years.  Which knowledge drew confirmation from what immediately followed.  For, as by almost imperceptible degrees the brightness faded in the west, the figures, so mysteriously peopling the room, faded out also, until only the woman in homely garments was left.  By her side stood the charcoal drawing of Sir Charles Verity from off the wall—­or seemed to do so, for almost at once, Damaris saw that dreaded interchange of personality again take place.  Saw the strongly marked features soften in outline, the face grow bearded yet younger by full thirty years.

Both the woman and the young man looked searchingly at her; and in the eyes of both she read the same question—­what did she mean to do, what to say, when her father, the object of her adoration, came home to her, came back to Deadham Hard?