"Oh! of course, I am lucky, tremendously lucky," he hastened to declare, laughing a little wryly. "Such a journey is a liberal education in itself, knocking the insularity out of a man--if he has any receptive faculty that is--and ridding him of all manner of stodgy prejudices. I don't the least undervalue my good fortune.--But you talk of remembering. That's stretching a point surely. You must have been a mere baby, my dear Damaris, when you left India." "No, I was six years old, and I remember quite well. All my caring for people, all my thinking, begins there, in the palace of the Sultan-i-bagh at Bhutpur and the great compound, when my father was Chief Commissioner." Her snub duly delivered, and she secure it had gone home, Damaris unbent, graciously communicative as never before. "It was all so beautiful and safe there inside the high walls, and yet a teeny bit frightening because you knew there were other things--as there are to-day--which you felt but couldn't quite see all about you. Sometimes they nearly pushed through--I was always expecting and I like to expect. It hurt me dreadfully to go away; but I had been very ill. They were afraid I should die and so Dr. McCabe--he was here when you arrived yesterday--insisted on my being sent to Europe. A lady--Mrs. Pereira--and my nurse Sarah Watson took me to Paris, to the convent school where I was to be educated. It was all very strange, but the nuns were kind. I liked their religion, and I got accustomed to the other little girls. I had rooms of my own; and French friends of my father's visited me and took me out on half-holidays. And Aunt Felicia came over to fetch me for the summer vacations and brought me here"-- Damaris pointed across the tide-way to the river frontage, including with one sweeping gesture the whole demesne of The Hard from the deep lane on the one hand, opening funnel-like upon the shore, past sea-wall--topped at the corner by pink plumed tamarisk, the small twin cannons and pyramid of ball--the lawn and irregular white house overlooking it, backed and flanked by rich growth of trees, to a strip of sandy warren and pine scrub on the other, from out which a line of some half-dozen purple stemmed, red branched Scotch firs, along with the grey stone built Inn and tarred wooden cottages on the promontory beyond, showed through a dancing shimmer of heat haze, against the land-locked, blue and silver waters of Marychurch Haven.