"Yes, my darling, very surely it is me," he said. "Any multiplication of specimens is quite superfluous--a single example of the breed is enough, conceivably more than enough." But to his distress, while he spoke, he saw the content die out of Damaris' expression and her eyes grow distended and startled. She glanced oddly at the hand he had just kissed and then at him again. "It seems to me something must have happened which I can't exactly remember," she anxiously told him, sitting upright and leaving go the curtain which slipped back into place shutting off the arm-chair and its occupant. "Something real, I mean, not just bad dreams. I know I had to ask you about it, and yet I didn't want to ask you." Charles Verity rose from his place, slowly walked the length of the room; and, presently returning, stood at the foot of the bed. Damaris still sat upright, her hands clasped, her hair hanging in a cloud about her to below the waist. The light was low and the shadow cast by the bed-curtain covered her. But, through it, he could still distinguish the startled anxiety of her great eyes as she pondered, trying to seize and hold some memory which escaped her. And he felt sick at heart, assured it could be but a matter of time before she remembered; convinced now, moreover, what she would, to his shame and sorrow, remember in the end. The purity in which he delighted, and to which he so frequently and almost superstitiously had turned for refreshment and the safeguarding of all the finest instincts of his own very complex nature, would, although she remembered, remain essentially intact. But, even so, the surface of it must be, as he apprehended, henceforth in some sort dimmed, and that by the breath of his own long ago misdoing. The revelation of passion and of sex, being practically and thus intimately forced home on her, the transparent innocence of childhood must inevitably pass away from her; and, through that same passing she would consciously go forward, embracing the privileges and the manifold burdens, the physical and emotional needs and aspirations of a grown woman. The woman might, would--such was his firm belief--prove a glorious creature. But it was not she whom he wanted. Her development, in proportion as it was rich and complete, led her away from and made her independent of him.--No, it wasn't she, but the child whom he wanted. And, standing at the foot of Damaris' bed, he knew, with a cruel certainty, he was there just simply to watch the child die.