Thus far Damaris had listened in deepening distaste.  Surely the young man very much magnified his office, was in manner exaggerated, in matter aggressive and verbose?  Notwithstanding its attempted solemnity and heat, his sermon seemed to be conventional, just a “way of talking,” and a conceited one at that.  But, as he proceeded to set forth his promised examples of local ill-living, distaste passed into bewilderment and finally into a sense of outrage, blank and absolute.  He named no names, and wrapped his statements up in Biblical language.  Yet they remained suggestive and significant enough.  He spoke, surely, of those whose honour was dearest to her, whom she boundlessly loved.  Under plea of rebuking vice, he laid bare the secrets, violated the sanctities of their private lives.  Yet was not that incredible?  All decencies of custom and usage forbade it, stamped such disclosure as unpermissible, fantastic.  He must be mad, or she herself mad, mishearing, misconceiving him.

“Adulterous father, bastard son—­publican sheltering youthful offenders from healthy punishment in the interests of personal gain.”—­Of that last she made nothing, failed to follow it.  But the rest?—­

It was true, too.  But not as he represented it, all its tragic beauty, all the nobleness which tempered and, in a measure at least, discounted the great wrong of it, stripped away—­leaving it naked, torn from its setting, without context and so without perspective.  Against this not only her tenderness, but sense of justice, passionately fought.  He made it monstrous and, in that far, untrue, as caricature is untrue, crying aloud for explanation and analysis.  Yet who could explain?  Circumstances of time and place rendered all protest impossible.  Nothing could be done, nothing said.  Thus her beloved persons were exposed, judged, condemned unheard, without opportunity of defence.

And realizing this, realizing redress hopelessly barred, she cowered down, her head bowed, almost to the level of the marble couch whereon the figures of knight and lady reposed in the high serenity of love and death.  Happier they than she, poor child, for her pride trailed in the dust, her darling romance of brother and sister and all the rare pieties of her heart, defiled by a shameful publicity, exposed for every Tom, Dick and Harry to paw over and sneer at!

Horror of a crowd, which watches the infliction of some signal disgrace, tormented her imagination, moreover, to the temporary breaking of her spirit.  Whether that crowd was, in the main, hostile or sympathetic mattered nothing.  The fact that it silently sat there, silently observed, made every member of it, for the time, her enemy.  Even the trusted servants just behind, comfortable comely Mary, soft Mrs. Cooper, the devoted Patch, were hateful to her as the rest.  Their very loyalty—­which she for no instant doubted—­went only to fill the cup of her humiliation to the brim.