wretched running away took a sharper edge.  For she realized, poor child, how much—­notwithstanding her proud little snubbing of him—­she coveted his good opinion, wished him to admire and to like her; wanted, even while she disapproved his self-complacency and slightly doubted his truthfulness, to have him carry with him a happy impression of her—­carry it with him to that enchanted far Eastern land in which all the poetry of her childhood had its root.  For, if remembrance of her remained with him, and that agreeably, she herself also found “Passage to India” in a sense.  And this idea, recondite though it was, touched and charmed her fancy—­or would have done so but for the recollection of her deplorable flight.—­Oh! what—­what made her run away?  From what had she thus run?  If she could only find out!  And find, moreover, the cause sufficient to palliate, to some extent at least, the woefulness of her cowardice.

But at this point her meditation suffered interruption.  The three cormorants, having finished their sun-bath, rose from the sand and flapped off, flying low and sullenly in single file over the sea parallel with the eastward-trending coast-line.

With the departure of the great birds her surroundings seemed to lose their only element of active and conscious life.  The brooding sunlit evening became oppressive, so that in the space of a moment Damaris passed from solitude, which is stimulating, to loneliness, which is only sad.  Meanwhile the shadow cast by the ilex trees had grown sensibly longer, softer in outline, more transparent and finely intangible in tone, and the reek of the mud-flats more potent, according to its habit at sundown and low tide.

It quenched the garden scents with a fetid sweetness, symbolic perhaps of the languorous sheltered character of the scene and of much which had or might yet happen there—­the life breath of the genius loci, an at once seductive and, as Tom Verity had rightly divined, a doubtfully wholesome spirit!  Over Damaris it exercised an unwilling fascination, as of some haunting refrain ending each verse of her personal experience.  Even when, as a little girl of eight, fresh from the gentle restraints and rare religious and social amenities of an aristocratic convent school in Paris, she had first encountered it, it struck her as strangely familiar—­a thing given back rather than newly discovered, making her mind and innocent body alike eager with absorbed yet half-shuddering recognition.  A good ten years had elapsed since then, but her early impression still persisted, producing in her a certain spiritual and emotional unrest.