“What matters isn’t the aunts, is it, but ourselves?” Damaris quite gaily took him up.

“But wouldn’t you be lonely, my dear, and would you not find it burdensome to run the house yourself?”

“No—­no,” she cried.  “Not one bit.  Anyway let me try, Commissioner Sahib.  Let us be by ourselves together—­beautifully by ourselves, for a time at least.”

“So be it then,” Charles Verity said.

And perhaps, although hardly acknowledged, in the mind of each the same consideration operated.  For there remained a thing still to be done before the new order could be reckoned as fully initiated, still more fully established,—­a thing which, as each knew, could be best done without witnesses; a thing which both intended should very surely be done, yet concerning which neither proposed to speak until the hour of accomplishment actually struck.

That hour, in point of fact, struck sooner than Damaris anticipated, the sound and sight of it reaching her without prelude or opportunity of preparation.  For early in the afternoon of the second day she spent downstairs, as, sitting at the writing table in the long drawing-room, she raised her eyes from contemplation of the house-keeping books spread out before her, she saw her father walking slowly up from the sea-wall across the lawn.  And seeing him, for the moment, her mind carried back to that miracle of interchangeable personalities so distressingly haunting her at the beginning of her illness, when James Colthurst’s charcoal sketch of her father played cruel juggler’s tricks upon her.  For beside him now walked a man so strangely resembling him in height, in bearing and in build that, but for the difference of clothing and the bearded face, it might be himself had the clock of his life been set back by thirty years.

Damaris’ first instinct was of flight.  Just as when, out on the Bar with her cousin, Tom Verity, now nearly a month ago, overcome by a foreboding of far-reaching danger she had—­to the subsequent bitter wounding of her self-respect and pride—­shown the white feather, ignominiously turned tail and run away, was she tempted to run away now.

For it seemed too much.  It came too close, laying rough hands not only upon the deepest of her love and reverence for her father, but upon that still mysterious depth of her own nature, namely her apprehension of passion and of sex.  A sacred shame, an awe as at the commission of some covert act of impiety, overcame her as she looked at the two men walking, side by side, across the moist vividly green carpet of turf in the chill white sunshine, the plain of an uneasy grey sea behind them.  She wanted to hide herself, to close eyes and ears against further knowledge.  Yes—­it came too close; and at the same time made her feel, as never before, isolated and desolate—­as though a great gulf yawned between her and what she had always counted pre-eminently her own, most securely her property because most beloved.