She would have hailed the whirr of the mowing machine or swish of a broom on the lawn .-- Oh! if only her poor dear Nannie were still alive, safe upstairs, there in the old nursery! And at that the child Damaris felt a lump rise in her throat.

But the girl, the soon-to-be woman, Damaris choked it down bravely.

For nobody, nothing--so she assured herself, going back to the lesson learned yesterday upon the open moorland--is really inevitable unless you suffer or will it so to be.

Wherefore she stiffened herself against recognition of loneliness, stiffened herself against inclination to mourning, refused to acquiesce in or be subjugated by either and, to the better forgetting of them, sought consolation among her great-great uncle's books.
For at this period Damaris was an omnivorous reader, eager for every form of literature and every description of knowledge--whether clearly comprehended or not--which the beloved printed page has to give.

An eagerness, it may be noted, not infrequently productive of collisions with Theresa, and at this particular juncture all the more agreeable to gratify on that very account.