"Lor! but women's rum cattle to deal with, the
first man found that to his cost;
And I reckon it's just through a woman, that the
last man on earth'll be lost."

G. R. SIMS.


Damaris was the only daughter of Squire Hethencourt. Her mother was an
Italian from the Udino, where the hair of the women is genuine
Titian-red and the eyes are blue; which perhaps accounted for her
colouring and some part of her temperament.

Her type of beauty was certainly remarkable--given, it must be
confessed, to a certain amount of fluctuation--and she danced divinely,
which gift must not be counted as a parlour-trick; she was slow in her
movements and quiet in her manner until she talked of horses or anybody
she loved; then her great eyes would flash and her laugh ring out, also
she would gesticulate as her mother had been wont to do, until the
climate, maybe, of a northern country had served to repress the
spontaneity of her Latin mannerisms.

She was simple and unsophisticated and would have made a splendid
little chum, if only one out of every three men who met her had not
been consumed with a desire to annex her for life by means of a gold
ring.

"Dads," she exclaimed, two months before the beginning of this story,
having enticed him to her bedroom one night and offered him cream