That night he received a letter from Melville, written in answer to the one in which he had told him the story of Damaris. Melville was far away in Asia at a Jesuit mission station in the snowy mountains, and his reply had taken many months to cross the Chinese plains and seas.

'What you tell me,' he wrote, 'of a child whom I knew so happy on her little island has startled and does distress me greatly. Was it any other than yourself who were her friend, I should be not only distressed but very apprehensive. She is of that ardent, impetuous, imaginative temperament which can be led to any madness if misled by its dreams or by its affections. I shall for ever blame myself that I did not see her before my departure for Asia. But I left the South of France for Rome very hurriedly, and thence came at once to these strange lands to examine and report on the state of all the Catholic missions of the far East to the Vatican. I had not a moment for any personal memories or personal farewells.

'I would that I were in Europe, but it will be impossible for me to execute my errand under another year. You will do, I know, all that is chivalrous and generous by her, but what I fear is that thus doing it you will inevitably become the angel and ideal of her poetic fancy. Let me urge on you to see her yourself as little as is consistent with necessity and common kindness, and to have her as much as possible occupied by intellectual pursuits and interests. You will not be offended with me that I say thus much. The vulgar successes of such easy seduction will have no attraction for you, and I am sure that the share which your wife originally had in thus bringing about her misfortunes will make this child altogether sacred to you.

'The dramatic art may be the only career, as you say, which is open to her. I remember that she was for ever reading plays and poems, and could recite her favourite passages with pathos and with fire. It is not what one would choose for her, but if she enter upon it, it may occupy her and save her from herself. I have no churchman's prejudice against that or any art. My time, when in Paris, has been largely spent amongst great artists, and I have found in them many great qualities of the mind and heart which might go far to balance before any judge the freedom and the passions of their unconventional lives. I believe the character of Damaris to be in every way that of an artist. That resistance to all inherited destiny, and to all habitual surroundings, always marks out the one who is born to separate himself or herself from the common herd, and she had this very strongly. Hardy, and loving all country things and seafaring ways, as she did, there was yet always in her something which was unlike her destiny, something restless, daring, and dreamful, something which, wherever it is found, presages woe or fame. She has at all times attracted me greatly, for from her earliest years she has had that about her which suggests the possession of genius, and there is in her that union of the peasant and the patrician which has before now made the most original, and most psychologically interesting, characters on the earth. Tell me more and at once of what you expect from her future, if she be not, indeed, as yet too young for its horoscope to be securely cast. I will write to her direct. Meantime receive my thanks for all that you have already done to save this poor sea-gull astray in a city, and believe in my respect and esteem. Of course you have told Madame NadÈge: what does she say?'

Othmar read the letter sitting in the solitude of his library in the small hours of the waning night; and a pang, which was almost that of conscience, smote him as he did thus read. He had done nothing indeed to forfeit the esteem of the writer; nothing which made him unworthy of the writer's confidence; yet a vague sense that he had been unwise in all which he had meant for kindness, and wrong in the reticence which had sprung from his own selfish sensitiveness, oppressed him with a useless self-reproach. How could he tell Melville that his wife knew nothing of the presence of Damaris BÉrarde at Chevreuse, without appearing to him to have become that mere vulgar seducer which Melville would have thought it the grossest of insults to suppose him?