"'She brought him butter in a lordly dish,'" Tom quoted. "The ill-advised Bilson. Can't one just see her!" "And it is not her place to admire out loud," Damaris continued. "Over and over again I have tried to explain that to her. But in some ways, she is not at all clever. She can't or won't understand, and only tells Aunt Felicia I am wanting in sympathy and that I hurt her feelings. She has unreasonably many feelings, I think, and they are so easily hurt. I always know when the hurting takes place because she sniffs and then plays Mendelssohn's Songs without Words on the schoolroom piano." Tom chuckled. She had a caustic tongue on occasion, this nymph-like creature! "Alas, poor Bilson!" he said. "For, as Sir Charles walked across the garden with us down to the ferry, didn't I hear those same sugary melodies tinkling out of some upper open window?" "I am afraid you did. You see she had made up her mind to come with me." "And you were forced to intimate you found yourself quite equal to conducting the expedition unshepherded?" "I did not mean to be unkind, but she would have been so dreadfully in the way"-- Damaris gathered up a handful of little pebbles, and let them dribble down slowly between her outspread fingers while, turning her head, she gazed away out to sea. "This is a day by itself," she said. "It looks like jewels, topazes, turquoise, and pearls; and it seems full of things which half tell themselves, and then hide from or pass you by.--I wanted to watch it all and think; and, she doesn't do it on purpose I know, but somehow Miss Bilson always interferes with my thinking." Both the tone and substance of this discourse proved slightly startling to its hearer. They carried the conversation into regions transcendental; and to his blissful laziness, the rarefied air of those regions was unwelcome. To breathe it demanded exertion. So he said, chaffingly: "Do I interfere with your thinking? I hope not. But if I offend that way, speak but a word and I disappear like a shot." "Oh! no," she answered. "How could you interfere? You are part of it. You started it, you see, because you are going to India." Whereat, failing to catch the sequence of ideas, male vanity plumed itself, tickled to the point of amusement. For was not she a child after all, transparently simple and candid, and very much a woman-child at that! Tom turning on his side raised himself on one elbow, smiling at her with easy good-nature. "How charming of you to adopt me as a special object of thought, and care so much about my going." But patronage proved short-lived. The girl's colour deepened, but her eyes dwelt on him coldly. "I have only been thinking how fortunate you are, and seeing pictures in my mind of what you will see which will be new to you--and--and remembering."