By such varied activities had Carteret systematically essayed to rid himself of his somewhat exquisite distemper, and, when coming to Deadham, honestly believed himself immune, sane and safe.  He was proportionately disturbed by finding the cure of this autumn love-madness less complete than, fool-like, he had supposed.  For it showed disquieting signs of resurrection even when Damaris, arrayed in the sheen of silken sunlight, greeted him at the staircase foot, and an alarming disposition finally to fling away head-cloth and winding-sheet when she petulantly broke in upon Miss Verity’s faded memories of Canton Magna with the flattering assertion that time had run backward with him of late.

Now alone with her, confident, moreover, of her maidenly doubts and pretty self-distrust, he felt at a decided disadvantage.  The detached, affectionately friendly, the avuncular—­not to say grandfatherly—­attitude escaped him.  He could not play that part.

“Oh! you exaggerate difficulties,” he therefore told her, with a singular absence of his habitual mansuetude, his tone trenching on impatience.  “Instinct and common sense will teach you-mother-wit, too-of which, you may take it from me, you have enough and to spare.-Let alone that there will be a host of people emulous of guiding your steps aright, if your steps should stand in need of guidance which I venture to doubt.  Don’t underrate your own cleverness.”  Hearing him, sensible of his apparent impatience and misconceiving the cause of it, Damaris’ temper stirred.  She felt vexed.  She also felt injured.

“What has happened to you, Colonel Sahib?” she asked him squarely.  “I see nothing foolish in what I have said.  You wouldn’t have me so conceited that I rushed into this immense business without a qualm, without any thought whether I can carry it out creditably—­with credit to him, I mean?”

 Thus astonishingly attacked, Carteret hedged.

 “Miss Verity, of course, will be”—­he began.

 Damaris cut him short.

 “Aunt Felicia is an angel, a darling,” she declared, “but—­but”—­

And there stopped, pricked by a guilty conscience.  For to expose Miss Felicia’s inadequacies and enlarge on her ineligibility for the position of feminine Chief of the Staff, struck her as unworthy, a meanness to which, under existing circumstances, she could not condescend to stoop.

Carteret looked up, to be entranced not only by the fair spectacle of her youth but by her delicious little air of shame and self-reproach.  Evidently she had caught herself out in some small naughtiness—­was both penitent and defiant, at once admitting her fault and pleading for indulgence.  He suspected some thought at the back of her mind which he could neither exactly seize nor place.  She baffled him with her changes of mood and of direction—­coming close and then slipping from under his hand.  This humour was surely new in her.  She would not