It was square, forcible, slightly cleft; and his mouth, below the fly-away reddish moustache, was frankly delightful .-- Damaris flushed, smiling to herself now as she recalled his smile.

Whereupon the humiliation of that thrice wretched running away took a sharper edge.

For she realized, poor child, how much--notwithstanding her proud little snubbing of him--she coveted his good opinion, wished him to admire and to like her; wanted, even while she disapproved his self-complacency and slightly doubted his truthfulness, to have him carry with him a happy impression of her--carry it with him to that enchanted far Eastern land in which all the poetry of her childhood had its root.

For, if remembrance of her remained with him, and that agreeably, she herself also found "Passage to India" in a sense.
And this idea, recondite though it was, touched and charmed her fancy--or would have done so but for the recollection of her deplorable flight .-- Oh! what--what made her run away?
From what had she thus run?
If she could only find out! And find, moreover, the cause sufficient to palliate, to some extent at least, the woefulness of her cowardice.
But at this point her meditation suffered interruption.

The three cormorants, having finished their sun-bath, rose from the sand and flapped off, flying low and sullenly in single file over the sea parallel with the eastward-trending coast-line.
With the departure of the great birds her surroundings seemed to lose their only element of active and conscious life.