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.
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