This visit would prove well worth while.

So absorbed, indeed, was he in watching the man whom he supposed--and rightly--to be his host, that he failed to notice one of the ladies rise from the tea-table and advance across the lawn, until her youthful white-clad form was close upon him, threading its way between the glowing geranium beds.
Then--"You are my cousin, Thomas Verity ?" the girl asked, with a grave air of ceremony.
"Yes--and you--you are my cousin Damaris," he answered as he felt clumsily, being taken unaware in more respects than one, and, for all his ready adaptability, being unable to keep a note of surprise out of his voice and glance.
He had known of the existence of this little cousin, having heard--on occasion--vaguely irritated family mention of her birth at a time when the flame of the Mutiny still burned fiercely in the Punjab and in Oudh.
To be born under such very accentuated circumstances could, in the eyes of every normal Verity, hardly fail to argue a certain obtrusiveness and absence of good taste.

He had heard, moreover, disapproving allusions to the extravagant affection Sir Charles Verity was said to lavish upon this fruit of a somewhat obscure marriage--his only surviving child.

But the said family talk, in Tom's case, had gone in at one ear and out at the other--as the talk of the elder generation mostly does, and will, when the younger generation is solidly and wholesomely convinced of the overwhelming importance of its own personal affairs.

Consequently, in coming to Deadham Hard, Tom had thought of this little cousin--in as far as it occurred to him to think of her at all--as a child in the schoolroom who, beyond a trifle of good-natured notice at odd moments, would not enter into the count or matter at all.