It quenched the garden scents with a fetid sweetness, symbolic perhaps of
the languorous sheltered character of the scene and of much which had or
might yet happen there--the life breath of the _genius loci_, an at once
seductive and, as Tom Verity had rightly divined, a doubtfully wholesome
spirit! Over Damaris it exercised an unwilling fascination, as of some
haunting refrain ending each verse of her personal experience. Even when,
as a little girl of eight, fresh from the gentle restraints and rare
religious and social amenities of an aristocratic convent school in
Paris, she had first encountered it, it struck her as strangely
familiar--a thing given back rather than newly discovered, making her
mind and innocent body alike eager with absorbed yet half-shuddering
recognition. A good ten years had elapsed since then, but her early
impression still persisted, producing in her a certain spiritual and
emotional unrest.
And at that, by natural transition, her thought turned from Tom Verity to
fix itself upon the one other possible witness of her ignominy--namely,
the young master mariner who, coming ashore in Proud, the
lobster-catcher's cranky boat, had walked up the shifting shingle to the
crown of the ridge and stood watching her, in silence, for a quite
measurable period, before passing on his way down to the ferry.
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