CHAPTER I

IN MAIDEN MEDITATION


It was afternoon, about five o'clock. The fine September weather, hot and
cloudless, lasted still. The air was heavy with garden scents, the
aromatic sweetness of sun-baked gorse and pine-scrub on the warren, and
with the reek off the mud-flats of the Haven, the tide being low. Upon
the sandy skirts of the Bar, across the river just opposite, three
cormorants--glossy black against the yellow--postured in extravagant
angular attitudes drying their wings. Above the rim of the silver-blue
sea--patched with purple stains in the middle distance--webs of steamer
smoke lay along the southern sky. Occasionally a sound of voices, the
creak of a wooden windlass and grind of a boat's keel upon the pebbles as
it was wound slowly up the foreshore, came from the direction of the
ferry and of Faircloth's Inn. The effect was languorous, would have been
enervating to the point of mental, as well as physical, inertia had not
the posturing cormorants introduced a note of absurdity and the tainted
breath of the mud-flats a wholesome reminder of original sin.

Under these conditions, at once charming and insidious, Damaris Verity,
resting in a wicker deck-chair in the shade of the great ilex trees,
found herself alone, free to follow her own vagrant thoughts,
perceptions, imaginations without human let or hindrance. Free to dream
undisturbed and interrogate both Nature and her own much wondering soul.

For Sir Charles was away, staying with an old friend and former
brother-in-arms, Colonel Carteret, for a week's partridge shooting over