To have you would make us both so happy"-- And, in her innocent importunity, Damaris slipped her hand within Colonel Carteret's arm sweetly coaxing him.
He started slightly.

Threw back his head, standing, straight and tall, in the mysterious twilight beside her.

Raised his deerstalker cap, for a moment, letting the moist chill of the November evening dwell on his hair and forehead.
Though very popular with women, Carteret had never married, making a home for his elder sister, Mrs.Dreydel--widow of a friend and fellow officer in the then famous "Guides"-- and her four sturdy, good-looking boys at the Norfolk manor-house, which had witnessed his own birth and those of a long line of his ancestors.

To bring up a family of his own, in addition to his sister's, would have been too costly, and debt he abhorred.
Therefore, such devoirs as he paid the great goddess Aphrodite, were but few and fugitive--he being by nature and temperament an idealist and a notably clean liver.

By his abstention, however, sentiment was fine-trained rather than extinguished.