"And I you," Damaris echoed. "I did, I did, after just the first little minute."
"Ah! you've a memory for faces too?"
Her glance wandered to the group of men gathered before the hotel portico—Sir Charles and General Frayling side by side, engaged in civil if not particularly animated conversation. The two voices reached her with a singular difference of timbre and of tone. Carteret spoke, apparently making some proposition, some invitation, in response to which the four passed into the house.
Henrietta settled herself in her chair with a movement of sensible relief. While they remained there she must look, and it was not quite healthy to look.—Her good, little, old General, who only asked respectfully to adore and follow in her wake—a man of few demands and quite tidy fortune—and after poor, besotted, blustering, gambling, squashily sentimental and tearful Johnnie Pereira wasn't he a haven of rest—oh, positively a haven of rest? All the same she preferred his not standing there in juxtaposition to Charles Verity. She much preferred their all going indoors—Carteret along with the rest, if it came to that.
She turned and smiled upon Damaris.
"However good your memory for faces may be, I find it very sweet you should have recognized mine after 'just the first little minute,'" she said, with a coaxing touch of mimicry. "You haven't quite parted company with the baby I remember so well, even yet. I used to call you my downy owl, with solemn saucer eyes and fierce little beak. You were extraordinarily, really perplexingly like your father then. A miniature edition, but so faithful to the original it used, sometimes, to give me the quaintest jump."
Henrietta mused, raising one hand and fingering the lace at her throat as seeking to loosen it. Damaris watched fascinated, in a way troubled, by her extreme prettiness. Every point, every detail was so engagingly complete.
"You are like Sir Charles still; but I see something which is not him—the personal equation, I suppose, developing in you, the element which is individual, exclusively your own and yourself. I should enjoy exploring that."
She looked at Damaris very brightly for an instant, then looked down.
"I want to hear more about Sir Charles," she said. "Of all the distinguished men I have been fortunate enough to know, who—who have let me be their friend, no one has ever interested me more than he. We have known one another ever since I was a girl and his career meant so much to me. I followed it closely, rejoiced in his promotion, his successes; felt indignant—and said so—when he met with adverse criticism. I am speaking of his Indian career. When he accepted that Afghan command, it made a break. We lost touch, which I regretted immensely. From that time onward I only knew what any and everybody might know from the newspapers—except occasionally when I happened to meet Colonel Carteret."