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Carteret placed the folded letter in it, and so doing, let his hand quietly close down over hers not in any sense as a caress, but as assurance of a sympathy it was forbidden him, in decency and loyalty, to speak. For a while they both remained silent. Damaris was first to move. She put the letter back into the breast-pocket of her jacket. "I am glad you know, Colonel Sahib," she gravely said.
Late one afternoon, the hour of a hidden sunset, Reginald Sawyer called at The Hard; and to his eminent satisfaction for social aspirations were by no means foreign to him was invited to remain to tea. The ladies Damaris and Miss Felicia were kind, the cakes and cream superlative.
Freedom seemed abroad this morning. Even the leaves declared for liberty, courting individual adventure upon the wings of that daring wind. And this sense of surrounding activity worked upon Damaris, making her doubly impatient of denials and arbitrary restraints. She sent her soul after Darcy Faircloth across the waste of waters, fondly, almost fiercely seeking him.
And she suffered this religious coldness, although any idea that death of the body implies extinction of the spirit, extinction of personality, never occurred to her. Damaris' sense of the unseen was too ingrained, her commerce with it too actual for that. No the spirit lived on. He, her most beloved, lived on, himself, his very self; but far away from her.
The sea had risen, but noiselessly, creeping up and up towards her, no line of white marking the edge of its slothful oncoming. Damaris stood up, pulling her white jersey the surface of it already furred with moisture low over her hips. For she felt shivery, and the air was thick and chill to breathe causing a tightness in her throat.
He meant to satisfy that curiosity presently; but the subject must be approached with tact. He must wait on opportunity. A few paces from and above him, Damaris sat on the crown of the ridge, where the light southerly wind, coming up now and again off the sea, fanned her.
"At first methought these two women, but now do I know Joan is Damaris and Damaris Joan and you a poor, lovelorn fool. But as for me I am Joanna " Now at this I turned and looked at her. "Joanna?" said I, wondering. "Ah, you have heard it this name, before yes?" "Aye, in a song."
Now in broad daylight, the generous sunshine flooding him, the smooth river purring and glittering at his feet, belief in grim and ghostly happenings became more than ever inadmissible, not to say quite arrantly grotesque. Yet Damaris' version of those same happenings tallied with his own in every point.
And everything had danced to so inspiring a tune, the movement of it so delicious! Now the evening was spoilt. The first fine alacrity of it could not be recaptured which was all Aunt Felicia's fault. No, for her unkindness Damaris felt no regret.
Damaris slipped her feet down off the leg-rest, and sat upright, tense with the effort to grasp and disentangle the bearings of this revelation. Was her search ended? Had she indeed detected the cause of her discomfiture; or only pushed her enquiry back a step further, thus widening rather than limiting the field of speculation?
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