She barely noticed them, as blindly heroic, she pounded along leading her piteous forlorn hope.

Her chance--her unique chance, in nowise to be missed--and, still more, those obscure hungers, fed by the excitement of this midnight _tete-a-tete,_ rushed her forward upon the abyss; while at every sputtering sentence, whether of adulation, misplaced prudery, or thinly veiled animosity towards Damaris, she became more tedious, more frankly intolerable and ridiculous to him whose favour she so desperately sought.

Under less anxious circumstances Charles Verity might have been contemptuously amused at this exhibition of futile ardour.

Now it exasperated him.

Yet he waited, in rather cruel patience.
Presently he would demolish her, if to do so appeared worth the trouble.
Meanwhile she should have her say, since incidentally he might learn something from it bearing upon the cause of Damaris' illness.
But now, when, at the climax of her narrative, Theresa--seized by a spasm of retrospective resentment and jealousy, the picture of the young man carrying the girl tenderly in his arms across the dusky lawns arising before her--choked and her voice cracked up into a bat-like squeaking, Charles Verity's self-imposed forbearance ran dry.
"I must remind you that neither my time nor capacity of listening are inexhaustible, Miss Bilson," he said to her.