And then there flashed through her, with a singular vividness, recollection of another, long, long ago escapade--when as a still almost baby child she had stepped off alone, in daring experiment, and fallen asleep, in the open as to-day.

But in surroundings how amazingly different!--A place of fountains, cypresses and palms, she curled up in a black marble chair, set throne fashion, upon a platform of blood red sandstone, an age-old Oriental garden outstretched below.

Colonel Carteret--"the man with the blue eyes" as she always had called him--awakened her, bringing an adorable and, as it proved in the sequel, a tragic birthday gift .-- Tragic because to it might, actually if indirectly, be traced the breaking up of her childhood's home in the stately Indian pleasure palace of the Sultan-i-bagh at Bhutpur, her separation from her father and exile--as she had counted it--to Europe.
It is among the doubtful privileges of highly sensitized natures, such as Damaris', that, in hours of crisis, vision and pre-vision go hand in hand.

As there flashed through her remembrance of that earlier sleep in the open, there flashed through her also conviction that history would still further repeat itself.

Now, as then, the incident of sleep preluded the receipt of a gift, adorable perhaps, yet freighted with far-reaching consequences to herself and her future.