If this was what people commonly understand when they speak of love, if this was the love concerning which novelists write and poets sing--this riot of the blood and heady rapture, this conflict of shame and triumph in which the animal part of one has so loud a word to say--she didn't like it. It was upsetting, to the confines of what she supposed drunkenness must be. It spoilt things heretofore exquisite, by giving them too high a colour, too violent a flavour. No--she didn't like it. Neither did she like herself in relation to it--like this unknown, storm-swept Damaris. Nor--for he, alas! couldn't escape inclusion--this new, unfamiliar presentment of the man with the blue eyes. Yet--and here was a puzzle difficult of solution--even while this new presentment of him, and conception of his sentiment towards her, pulled him down from his accustomed pedestal in her regard, it erected for him another pedestal, more richly sculptured and of more costly material--since had not his manifold achievements, the whole fine legend as well as the whole physical perfection of him, manifested themselves to, and worked upon her as never before?--Did this thing, love, then, as between man and woman, spring from the power of beauty while soiling and lowering beauty--bestow on it an hour of extravagant effulgence, of royal blossoming, only to degrade it in the end?--The puzzle is old as humanity, old, one may say, as sex. Little wonder if Damaris, sitting up in her maidenly bedchamber, in the unsullied brightness of the early morning hour, failed to find any satisfactory answer to it. Her thoughts ranged out to the other members of her little local court--to Peregrine Ditton and Harry Ellice, to Marshall Wace. Had they personal experience of this disquieting matter? Was it conceivable the boys' silly rivalries and jealousies concerning her took their rise in this? Did it inspire the fervour of Marshall Wace's singing, his flattering dependence on her sympathy?--Suspicion widened. Everywhere she seemed to find hint and suggestion of this--no, she wouldn't too distinctly define it. Let it remain nameless.--Everywhere, except in respect of her father and of her brother. There she could spend her heart in peace. She sighed with a sweetness of relief, unclasping her hands, raising her fixed, bowed head.