"Oh! you exaggerate difficulties," he therefore told her, with a singular absence of his habitual mansuetude, his tone trenching on impatience. "Instinct and common sense will teach you-mother-wit, too-of which, you may take it from me, you have enough and to spare.-Let alone that there will be a host of people emulous of guiding your steps aright, if your steps should stand in need of guidance which I venture to doubt. Don't underrate your own cleverness." Hearing him, sensible of his apparent impatience and misconceiving the cause of it, Damaris' temper stirred. She felt vexed. She also felt injured. "What has happened to you, Colonel Sahib?" she asked him squarely. "I see nothing foolish in what I have said. You wouldn't have me so conceited that I rushed into this immense business without a qualm, without any thought whether I can carry it out creditably--with credit to him, I mean?" Thus astonishingly attacked, Carteret hedged. "Miss Verity, of course, will be"--he began. Damaris cut him short. "Aunt Felicia is an angel, a darling," she declared, "but--but"-- And there stopped, pricked by a guilty conscience. For to expose Miss Felicia's inadequacies and enlarge on her ineligibility for the position of feminine Chief of the Staff, struck her as unworthy, a meanness to which, under existing circumstances, she could not condescend to stoop. Carteret looked up, to be entranced not only by the fair spectacle of her youth but by her delicious little air of shame and self-reproach. Evidently she had caught herself out in some small naughtiness--was both penitent and defiant, at once admitting her fault and pleading for indulgence. He suspected some thought at the back of her mind which he could neither exactly seize nor place. She baffled him with her changes of mood and of direction--coming close and then slipping from under his hand. This humour was surely new in her. She would not leave him alone, would not let him rest. Had she developed, since last he had converse with her, into a practised coquette? "Look here, dear witch," he said, making a return upon himself, and manfully withstanding the sweet provocation of her near neighbourhood. "We seem to be queerly at cross purposes. I can't pretend to follow the turnings and doublings of your ingenious mind. I gather there is something you want of me. To be plain, then, what is it?" "That--that you shouldn't desert me--desert us--in this crisis. You have never deserted me before--never since I can first remember." "I desert you--good Lord!" Carteret exclaimed, his hands dropping at his sides with an odd sort of helplessness. "Ah! that's asking too much, I suppose," she said. "I'm selfish even to think of it. Yet how can I do otherwise? Don't you understand how all difficulties would vanish, and how beautifully simple and easy everything would be if you coached me--if you, dear Colonel Sahib, went with us?"