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