These sounds to our sorrowfully perplexed maiden opened fresh fields of uneasy speculation.  For those diverse accents—­the speakers being unseen—­heard thus in conjunction, seized on and laboured her imagination.  Throughout the past months of frequent meeting, Damaris had never quite understood her father’s attitude towards Henrietta Frayling.  It was marked by reserve; yet a reserve based, as she somehow divined, upon an uncommon degree of former intimacy.  Judging from remarks let drop now and again by Henrietta, they knew, or rather had known, one another very well indeed.  This bore out Damaris’ own childhood’s recollections; though in these last she was aware of lacunae, of gaps, of spaces unbridged by any coherent sequence of remembered events.  A dazzling and delicious image, the idol of her baby adoration—­thus did memory paint that earlier Henrietta.  Surrounding circumstances remained shadowy.  She could not recall them even in respect of herself, still less in respect of her father.  So that question, as to the past, ruled the present.  What had parted them, and how did they to-day envisage one another?  She could not make out.  Had never, indeed, attempted seriously to make out, shying from such investigation as disloyal and, in a way, irreverent.  Now investigation was forced on her.  Her mind worked independent of her will, so that she could neither prevent or arrest it.  Sir Charles showed himself scrupulously attentive and courteous to General Frayling.  He offered no spoken objection to her association with Henrietta.  Yet an unexplained element did remain.  Subtlely, but perceptibly, it permeated both her father’s and Henrietta’s speech and bearing.  She, Damaris, was always conscious of a certain constraint beneath their calm and apparently easy talk.  Was their relation one of friendship or of covert enmity?—­Or did these, just perceptible, peculiarities of it betoken something deeper and closer still?

Suspicion once kindled spreads like a conflagration.—­Damaris’ hands dropped, a dead weight, into her lap.  She sat, strained yet inert, as though listening to catch the inner significance of her own unformulated question, her eyes wide and troubled, her lips apart.  For might it not be that they had once—­long ago—­in the princely, Eastern pleasure palace of her childhood—­cared in that way?

Then the tears which, what with tiredness and the labour pains of her many conflicting emotions, had threatened more than once to-day, came into their own.  She wept quietly, noiselessly, the tears running down her cheeks unchecked and unheeded.  For there was no escape.  Turn where she would, join hands with whom she would in all good faith and innocence, this thing reared its head and, evilly alluring looked at her.  Now it set its claim upon her well-beloved Sultan-i-bagh—­and what scene could in truth be more sympathetic to its display?  She felt the breath of high romance.  Imagination played strange tricks with her.  She