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Damaris Hethencourt most certainly ought not to have been there, but you must perforce follow the path Fate has marked out for you, whether it leads through country lanes, or Piccadilly, or the Arab quarter of Cairo. The vendor of silks salaamed deeply before her beauty and the graciousness of her manner, for she smiled when she talked and spoke the prettiest broken Arabic in the world.
Thyra stood up, and for a moment they looked at each other. The insolence of Damaris' beauty was gone. Her eyes were dull and heavy with weeping, her lips were pale, and her face had lost its laughter and dimples. Only her hair, escaping from the shawl she had cast around it, gushed forth in warm splendor in the sunset light, and framed her wan face like the aureole of a Madonna.
It was infinitely distasteful to him definitely to plan, or to decide respecting anything. Meanwhile his continued silence and abstraction wore badly upon Damaris. She had steeled herself; had flamed, greatly daring. Now reaction set in. Her effort proved vain. She had failed.
"Oh! it amounts to more than absent-mindedness I'm afraid a sort of absent-every-thingedness when it overtakes me. For the whole of me seems to go away and away, hand in hand and all together," Damaris said, her eyes alight with questions and with dreams. "But don't let us discuss that now," she added.
Damaris threaded the palace ways until she reached the chamber which she shared with a laughter-loving girl from her own countryside. Closed and darkened was the little room, but the maid of honor, moving to the window, drew the hangings and let the sunshine in. From a cabinet she took a book in manuscript, then with it in her hands knelt upon the window-seat and looked out upon the Thames.
'T is the contrast between the courageousness of the two poor sawls jumpin' into the state, an' the solid fact of bein' a man's wife or a woman's husband for all time. The vows they swear! An' that Martin's voice so strong an' cheerful! A teeming cause o' broken oaths the marriage sarvice; yet each new pair comes along like sheep to the slaughter." "You talk like a bachelor man," said Damaris.
It looked out from the wasted face, at once to her seeing exquisite and austere, reaching forward, keenly curious of all death should reveal, unmoved, yet instinct with the brilliance, the mirthfulness even, of impending portentous adventure. "You know, Damaris, how greatly I love and have loved you how dear you have been to me, dearer than the satisfaction of my own flesh?"
"Guide her not, lady," shouted the sayis to Damaris, who answered to the movement of the mare like a reed in the wind, but otherwise seemed to take no notice of horse, or man, or moon, or untoward circumstance; he hung on for a moment to the silken mane and stared up into the girl's unseeing eyes; then, with a ringing shout, let go and jumped nimbly to one side.
At intervals, all-day expeditions were undertaken to Monte Carlo, or shopping raids upon Cannes or Nice. Yes, verily as he reflected Henrietta Frayling did keep the ball rolling with truly Anglo-Indian frivolity and persistence, here in the heart of Europe! And was that altogether wholesome for Damaris?
If you have not the vision you need not worry, for you will not want to wander from the hotel lounge after your coffee to traverse these ancient wastes. Damaris had spent the last fortnight in helping her godmother prepare for her tedious journey.
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