With a little thrill, half pain, half pleasure, she noted each well-remembered landmark. There was the arbour where they used to shelter from a shower, built with sloped boards at its entrance so that Patrick's chair could easily be wheeled into it; now they were passing the horse-chestnut tree which she herself had planted years ago—with the head gardener's assistance!—in place of one that had been struck by lightning. It had grown into a sturdy young sapling by this time. Here was the Queen's Bench—an old stone seat where Queen Elisabeth was supposed to have once sat and rested for a few minutes when paying a visit to Barrow Court. Sara reflected, with a smile, that if history speaks truly, the Virgin Queen must have spent quite a considerable portion of her time in visiting the houses of her subjects! And here—

"Sara!" Tim's voice broke suddenly across the recollections that were thronging into her mind. There was a curious intent quality in his tone that arrested her attention, filling her with a nervous foreboding of what he had to say.

"Sara, you know, of course, as well as I do, that I am going to volunteer. I let mother send for you, because—well, because I thought you would make it a little easier for her, for one thing. But I had another reason."

"Had you?" Sara spoke mechanically. They had paused beside the Queen's Bench, and half-unconsciously she laid her ungloved hand caressingly on the seat's high back. The stone struck cold against the warmth of her flesh.

"Yes." Tim was speaking again, still in that oddly direct manner. "I want to ask you—now, before I go to France—whether there will ever be any chance for me?"

Sara turned her eyes to his face.

"You mean——"

"I mean that I'm asking you once again if you will marry me? If you will—if I can go away leaving my wife in England, I shall have so much the more to fight for. But if you can't give me the answer I wish—well"—with a curious little smile—"it will make death easier, should it come—that's all."

The quiet, grave directness of the speech was very unlike the old, impetuous Tim of former days. It brought with it to Sara's mind a definite recognition of the fact that the man had replaced the boy.

"No, Tim," she responded quietly. "I made one mistake—in promising to marry you when I loved another man. I won't repeat it."

"But"—Tim's face expressed sheer wonder and amazement—"you don't still care for Garth Trent—for that blackguard? Oh!" remorsefully, as he saw her wince—"forgive me, Sara, but this war makes one feel even more bitterly about such a thing than one would in normal times."

"I know—I understand," she replied quietly. "I'm—ashamed of loving him." She turned her head restlessly aside. "But, don't you see, love can't be made and unmade to order. It just happens. And it's happened to me. In the circumstances, I can't say I like it. But there it is. I do love Garth—and I can't unlove him. At least, not yet."

"But some day, Sara, some day?" he urged.

She shook her head.

"I shall never marry anybody now, Tim. If—if ever I 'get over' this fool feeling for Garth, I know how it would leave me. I shall be quite cold and hard inside—like that stone"—pointing to the Queen's Bench. "I wish—I wish I had reached that stage now."

Silently Tim held out his hand, and she laid hers within it, meeting his grave eyes.

"I won't ever bother you again," he said, at last, quietly. "I think I understand, Sara, and—and, old girl, I'm awfully sorry. I wish I could have saved you—that."

He stooped his head and kissed her—frankly, as a big brother might, and Sara, recognizing that henceforth she would find in him only the good comrade of earlier days, kissed him back.

"Thank you, Tim," she said. "I knew you would understand. And, please, we won't ever speak of it again."

"No, we won't speak of it again," he answered.

He tucked his arm under hers, and they walked on together in the direction of the house.

"And now," she said, "let's go to Elisabeth and break it to her that we are—both—going out to France as soon as we can get there."

He turned to look at her.

"You?" he exclaimed. "You going out? What do you mean?"

"I'm going with Lady Arronby. I want to go—badly. I want to be in the heart of things. You don't suppose"—with a rather shaky little laugh—"that I can stay quietly at home in England—and knit, do you?"

"No, I suppose you couldn't. But I don't half like it. The women who go—out there—have got to face things. I shan't like to think of you running risks—"

She laughed outright.

"Tim, if you talk nonsense of that kind, I'll revenge myself by urging Elisabeth to keep you at home," she declared. "Oh! Tim boy, can't you see that just now I must have something to do—something that will fill up every moment—and keep me from thinking!"

Tim heard the cry that underlay the words. There was no misunderstanding it. He squeezed her arm and nodded.

"All right, old thing, I won't try to dissuade you. I can guess a little of how you're feeling."

Sara's interview with Elisabeth was very different from anything she had expected. She had anticipated passionate reproaches, tears even, for an attractive women who has been consistently spoiled by her menkind is, of all her sex, the least prepared to bow to the force of circumstances.

But there was none of these things. It almost seemed as though in that first searching glance of hers, which flashed from Sara's face to the well-beloved one of her son, Elisabeth had recognized and accepted that, in the short space of time since these two had met, the decision concerning Tim's future had been taken out of her hands.

It was only when, in the course of their long, intimate talk together, she had drawn from Sara the acknowledgment that she had once again refused to be Tim's wife, that her control wavered.

"But, Sara, surely—surely you can't still have any thought of marrying Garth Trent?" There was a hint of something like terror in her voice.

"No," Sara responded wearily. "No, I shall never marry—Garth Trent."

"Then why won't you—why can't you—"

"Marry Tim?"—quietly. "Because, although I shall never marry Garth now, I haven't stopped loving him."

"Do you mean that you can still care for him—now that you know what kind of man he is?"

"Oh! Good Heavens, Elisabeth!"—the irritation born of frayed nerves hardened Sara's voice so that it was almost unrecognizable—"you can't turn love on and off as you would a tap! I shall never marry anybody now. Tim understands that, and—you must understand it, too."

There was no mistaking her passionate sincerity. The truth—that Sara would never, as long as she lived, put another in the place Garth Trent had held—seemed borne in upon Elisabeth that moment.

With a strangled cry she sank back into her chair, and her eyes, fixed on Sara's small, stern-set face, held a strange, beaten look. As she sat there, her hands gripping the chair-arms, there was something about her whole attitude that suggested defeat.

"So it's all been useless—quite useless!" she muttered in a queer, whispering voice.

She was not looking at Sara now. Her vision was turned inward, and she seemed to be utterly oblivious of the other's presence. "Useless!" she repeated, still in that strange, whispering tone.

"What has been useless?" asked Sara curiously.

Elisabeth started, and stared at her for a moment in a vacant fashion. Then, all at once, her mind seemed to come back to the present, and simultaneously the familiar watchful look sprang into her eyes. Sara was oddly conscious of being reminded of a sentry who has momentarily slept at his post, and then, awakening suddenly, feverishly resumed his vigilance.

"What was I saying?" Elisabeth brushed her hand distressfully across her forehead.

"You said that it had all been useless," repeated Sara. "What did you mean?"

Elisabeth paused a moment before replying.

"I meant that all my hopes were useless," she explained at last. "The hopes I had that some day you would be Tim's wife."

"Yes, they're quite useless—if that is what you meant," replied Sara. But there was a perplexed expression in her eyes. She had a feeling that Elisabeth was not being quite frank with her—that that whispered confession of failure signified something other than the simple interpretations vouchsafed.

The thing worried her a little, nagging at the back of her mind with the pertinacity common to any little unexplained incident that has caught one's attention. But, in the course of a few days, the manifold happenings of daily life drove it out of her thoughts, not to recur until many months had passed and other issues paved the way for its resurgence.

Sara remained at Barrow until Tim had volunteered and been accepted, and the settlement of her own immediate plans synchronizing with this last event, it came about that it was only two hours after Tim's departure that she, too, bade farewell to Elisabeth, in order to join up in London with Lady Arronby's party.

Elisabeth stood at the head of the great flight of granite steps at Barrow and waved her hand as the car bore Sara swiftly away, and across the latter's mind flashed the memory of that day, nearly a year ago, when she herself had stood in the same place, waiting to welcome Elisabeth to her new home.

The contrast between then and now struck her poignantly. She recalled Elisabeth as she had been that day—gracious, smiling, queening it delightfully over her two big men, husband and son, who openly worshipped her. Now, there remained only a great empty house, and that solitary figure on the doorstep, standing there with white face and lips that smiled perfunctorily.

Elisabeth turned slowly back into the house as the car disappeared round the curve of the drive. For her, the moment was doubly bitter. One by one, husband, son, and the woman whom she had ardently longed to see that son's wife, had been claimed from her by the pitiless demands of the madness men call War.

But there was still more for her to face. There was the utter downfall of all her hopes, the defeat of all her purposes. She had striven with the whole force that was in her to assure Tim's happiness. To compass this, she had torn down the curtain of the past, proclaiming a man's shame and hurling headlong into the dust the new life he had built up for himself, and with it had gone a woman's faith, and trust, and happiness.

And it had all been so futile! Two lives ruined, and the purchase price paid in tears of blood; and, after all, Tim's happiness was as utterly remote and beyond attainment as though no torrent of disaster had been let loose to further it! Elisabeth had bartered her soul in vain.

In the solitude which was all the war had left her, she recognized this, and, since she was normally a woman of kind and generous impulses, she suffered in the realization of the spoiled and mutilated lives for which she was responsible.

Not that she would have acted differently were the same choice presented to her again. She did not want to hurt people, but the primitive maternal instinct, which was the pivot of her being, blinded her to the claims of others if those claims reacted adversely on her son.

Only now, in the bitterness of defeat, as she looked back upon her midnight interview with Garth Trent, she was conscious of a sick repugnance. It had not been a pleasant thing, that thrusting of a knife into an old wound. This, too, she had done for Tim's sake. The pity of it was that Garth had suffered needlessly—uselessly!

She had thought the issue of events hung solely betwixt him and her son, and, with her mind concentrated on this idea, she had overlooked the possibility of any other outcome. But the acceptance of an unexpected sequence had been forced upon her—Sara would never marry any one now! Elisabeth recognized that all her efforts had been in vain.

And the supreme bitterness, from which all that was honest and upright within her shrank with inward shame and self-loathing, lay in the fact that she, above all others, owed Garth Trent—that which he had begged of her in vain—the tribute of silence concerning the past.



CHAPTER XXXI

THE FURNACE

As Sara took her seat on board the train for Monkshaven, she was conscious of that strange little thrill of the wanderer returned which is the common possession of the explorer and of the school-girl at their first sight of the old familiar scenes from which they have been exiled.

She could hardly believe that barely a year had elapsed since she had quitted Monkshaven. So many things had happened—so many changes taken place. Audrey had been transformed into Mrs. Herrick; Tim had been given a commission; and Molly, the one-time butterfly, was now become a working-bee—a member of the V.A.D. and working daily at Oldhampton Hospital. Sara could scarcely picture such a metamorphosis!

The worst news had been that of Major Durward's death—he had been killed in action, gallantly leading his men, in the early part of the year. Elisabeth had written to Sara at the time—a wonderfully brave, simple letter, facing her loss with a fortitude which Sara, remembering her adoration for her husband and her curious antipathy to soldiering as a profession, had not dared to anticipate. There was something rather splendid about her quiet acceptance of it. It was Elisabeth at her best—humanly hurt and broken, but almost heroic in her endurance now that the blow had actually fallen. And Sara prayed that no further sacrifice might be demanded from her—prayed that Tim might come through safely. For herself, she mourned Geoffrey Durward as one good comrade does another. She knew that his death would leave a big gap in the ranks of those she counted friends.

It had been a wonderful year—that year which she had passed in France—wonderful in its histories of tragedy and self-sacrifice, and in its revelation both of the brutality and of the infinite fineness of humanity. Few could have passed through such an experience and remained unchanged, certainly no one as acutely sentient and receptive as Sara.

She felt as though she had been pitchforked into a vast melting-pot, where the cast-iron generalizations and traditions which most people consider their opinions grew flexible and fluid in the scorching heat of the furnace, assimilating so much of the other ingredients in the cauldron that they could never reassume their former unqualified and rigid state.

And now that year of crowded life and ardent service was over, and she was side-tracked by medical orders for an indefinite period.

"Go back to England," her doctor had told her, "to the quietest corner in the country you can find—and try to forget that there is a war!"

This thin, eager-faced young woman, of whom every one on the hospital staff spoke in such glowing terms, interested him enormously. He could see that her year's work had taken out of her about double what it would have taken out of any one less sensitively alive, and he made a shrewd guess that something over and above the mere hard work accounted for that curiously fine-drawn look which he had observed in her.

During a hastily snatched meal, before the advent of another batch of casualties, he had sounded Lady Arronby on the subject. The latter shook her head.

"I can tell you very little. I believe there was a bad love-affair just before the war. All I know is that she was engaged and that the engagement was broken off very suddenly."

"Humph! And she's been living on her reserves ever since. Pack her off to England—and do it quick."

So October found Sara back in England once again, and as the train steamed into Monkshaven station, and her eager gaze fell on the little group of people on the platform, waiting to welcome her return, she felt a sudden rush of tears to her eyes.

She winked them away, and leaned out of the window. They were all there—big Dick Selwyn, and Molly, looking like a masquerading Venus in her V.A.D. uniform, the Lavender Lady and Miles, and—radiant and well-turned-out as ever—Mile's wife.

The Herrick's wedding had taken place very unobtrusively. About a month after Sara had crossed to France, Miles and Audrey had walked quietly into church one morning at nine o'clock and got married.

Monkshaven had been frankly disappointed. The gossips, who had so frequently partaken of Audrey's hospitality and then discussed her acrimoniously, had counted upon the lavish entertainment with which, even in war-time, the wedding of a millionaire's widow might be expected to be celebrated.

Instead of which, there had been this "hole-and-corner" sort of marriage, as the disappointed femininity of Monkshaven chose to call it, and, after a very brief honeymoon, Miles and Audrey had returned and thrown themselves heart and soul into the work of organizing and equipping a convalescent hospital for officers, of which Audrey had undertaken to bear the entire cost.

Henceforth the mouths of Audrey's detractors were closed. She was no longer "that shocking little widow with the dyed hair," but a woman who had married into a branch of one of the oldest families in the county, and whose immense private fortune had enabled her to give substantial help to her country in its need.

"I think it's simply splendid of you, Audrey," declared Sara warmly, as they were all partaking of tea at Greenacres, whither Audrey's car had borne them from the station.

Audrey laughed.

"My dear, what else could I do with my money? I've got such a sickening lot of it, you see! Besides"—with a bantering glance at her husband—"I think it was only the prospect of being of some use at my hospital which induced Miles to marry me! He's my private secretary, you know, and boss of the commissariat department."

Miles saluted.

"Quartermaster, at your service, miss," he said cheerfully, adding with a chuckle: "I saw my chance of getting a job if I married Audrey, so of course I took it."

He was looking amazingly well. The fact of being of some use in the world had acted upon him like a tonic, and there was no misinterpreting the glance of complete and happy understanding that passed between him and his wife.

Glad as she was to see it, it served to remind Sara painfully of all that she had missed, to stir anew the aching longing for Garth Trent, which, though struggled against, and beaten down, and sometimes temporarily crowded out by the thousand claims of each day's labour, had been with her all through the long months of her absence from Monkshaven.

It was this which had worn her so fine, not the hard physical work that she had been doing. Always slender, and built on racing lines, there was something almost ethereal about her now, and her sombre eyes looked nearly double their size in her small face of which the contour was so painfully distinct. Yet she was as vivid and alive as ever; she seemed to diffuse, as it were, a kind of spiritual brilliance.

"She makes one think of a flame," Audrey told her husband when they were alone once more. "There is something so vital about her, in spite of that curiously frail look she has."

Miles nodded.

"She's burning herself out," he said briefly.

Audrey looked startled.

"What do you mean, Miles?"

"Good Heavens! I should think it's self-evident. She's exactly as much in love with Trent as she was a year ago, and she's fighting against it every hour of her life. And the strain's breaking her."

"Can't we do something to help?" Audrey put her question with a helpless consciousness of its futility.

Herrick's eyes kindled.

"Nothing," he answered with quiet decision. "Every one must work out his own salvation—if it's to be a salvation worth having."

Herrick had delved to the root of the matter when he had declared that Sara was exactly as much in love as she had been a year ago.

She had realized this for herself, and it had converted life into an endless conflict between her love for Garth and her shamed sense of his unworthiness. And now, her return to Monkshaven, to its familiar, memory-haunted scenes, had quickened the struggle into new vitality.

With the broadened outlook born of her recent experiences, she began to ask herself whether a man need be condemned, utterly and for ever, for a momentary loss of nerve—even Elisabeth had admitted that it was probably no more than that! And then, conversely, her fierce detestation of that particular form of weakness, inculcated in her from her childhood by Patrick Lovell, would spring up protestingly, and she would shrink with loathing from the thought that she had given her love to a man who had been convicted of that very thing.

Nor was the attitude he had assumed in regard to the war calculated to placate her. She had learned from Molly that he had abstained from taking up any form of war-work whatsoever. He appeared to be utterly indifferent to the need of the moment, and the whole of Monkshaven buzzed with patriotic disapprobation of his conduct. There were few idle hands there now. A big munitions factory had been established at Oldhampton, and its demands, added to the necessities of the hospital, left no loophole of excuse for slackers.

Sara reflected bitterly that the sole courage of which Garth seemed possessed was a kind of cold, moral courage—brazen-facedness, the townspeople termed it—which enabled him to refuse doggedly to be driven out of Monkshaven, even though the whole weight of public opinion was dead against him.

And then the recollection of that day on Devil's Hood Island, when he had deliberately risked his life to save her reputation, would return to her with overwhelming force—mocking the verdict of the court-martial, repudiating the condemnation which had made her thrust him out of her life.

So the pendulum swung, this way and that, lacerating her heart each time it swept forward or back. But the blind agony of her recoil, when she had first learned the story of that tragic happening on the Indian frontier, was passed.

Then, overmastered by the horror of the thing, she had flung violently away from Garth, feeling herself soiled and dishonoured by the mere fact of her love for him, too revolted to contemplate anything other than the severance of the tie between them as swiftly as possible.

Now, with the widened sympathies and understanding which the past year of intimacy with human nature at its strongest, and at its weakest, had brought her, new thoughts and new possibilities were awaking within her.

The furnace—that fiercely burning furnace of life at its intensest—had done its work.



CHAPTER XXXII

ON CRABTREE MOOR

"Tim is wounded, and has been recommended for the Military Cross."

Sara made the double announcement quite calmly. The two things so often went together—it was the grey and gold warp and waft of war with which people had long since grown pathetically familiar.

"How splendid!" Molly enthused with sparkling eyes, adding quickly, "I hope he's not very badly wounded?"

"Elisabeth doesn't give any particulars in her letter. I can't understand her," Sara continued, her brows contracting in a puzzled fashion. "She seems so calm about it. She has always hated the idea of Tim's soldiering, yet now, although she's lost her husband and her son is wounded, she's taking it finely."

Selwyn looked up from filling his pipe.

"She's answering to the call—like every one else," he observed quietly.

"No." Sara shook her head. "I don't feel as though it were that. It's something more individual. Perhaps"—thoughtfully—"it's pride of a kind. The sort of impression I have is that she's so proud—so proud of Geoffrey's fine death, and of Tim's winning the Military Cross, that it has compensated in some way."

"The war's full of surprises," remarked Molly reflectively. "I never was so astonished in my life as when I found that Lester Kent's wife believed him to be a model of all the virtues! I wrote and told you—didn't I, Sara?—that he was sent to Oldhampton Hospital? He got smashed up, driving a motor ambulance, you know."

"Yes, you wrote and said that he died in hospital."

"Well, his wife came to see him, with her little boy. She was the sweetest thing, and so plucky. 'My dear,' she said to me, after it was all over, 'I hope you'll find a husband as dear and good. He was so loyal and true—and now that he's gone, I shall always have that to remember!'" Molly's eyes had grown very big and bright. "Oh! Sara," she went on, catching her breath a little, "supposing you hadn't brought me home—that night, she would have had no beautiful memory to help her now."

"And yet the memory is an utterly false one—though I suppose it will help her just the same! It's knowing the truth that hurts, sometimes." And Sara's lips twisted a little. "What a droll world it is—of shame and truth all mixed up—the ugly and the beautiful all lumped together!"

"And just now," put in Selwyn quietly, "it's so full of beauty."

"Beauty?" exclaimed both girls blankly.

Selwyn nodded, his eyes luminous.

"Isn't heroism beautiful—and self-sacrifice?" he said. "And this war's full of it. Sometimes, when I read the newspapers, I think God Himself must be surprised at the splendid things the men He made have done."

Sara turned away, swept by the recollection of one man she knew who had nothing splendid, nothing glorious, to his credit. Almost invariably, any discussion of the war ended by hurting her horribly.

"I'll take that basket of flowers across to the 'Convalescent' now, I think," she said, rising abruptly from her seat by the fire.

Selwyn nodded, mentally anathematizing himself for having driven her thoughts inward, and Molly, who had developed amazingly of late, tactfully refrained from offering to accompany her.

The Convalescent Hospital, situated on the crest of a hill above the town, was a huge mansion which had been originally built by a millionaire named Rattray, who, coming afterwards to financial grief, had found himself too poor to live in it when it was completed. It had been frankly impossible as a dwelling for any one less richly dowered with this world's goods, and, in consequence, when the place was thrown on the market, no purchaser would be found for it—since Monkshaven offered no attraction to millionaires in general.

Since then it had been known as Rattray's Folly, and it was not until Audrey cast covetous eyes upon it for her convalescent soldiers that the "Folly" had served any purpose other than that of a warning to people not to purchase boots too big for them.

A short cut from Sunnyside to the hospital lay through Crabtree Moor, and as Sara took her way across the rough strip of moorland, dotted with clumps of gorse and heather, her thoughts flew back to that day when she and Garth had encountered Black Brady there, and to the ridiculous quarrel which had ensued in consequence of Garth's refusal to condone the man's offence. For days they had not spoken to each other.

Looking backward, how utterly insignificant seemed that petty disagreement now! Had she but known the bitter separation that must come, she would have let no trifling difference, such as this had been, rob her of a single precious moment of their friendship.

She wondered if she and Garth would ever meet again. She had been back in Monkshaven for some weeks now, but he had studiously avoided meeting her, shutting himself up within the solitude of Far End.

And then, with her thoughts still centred round the man she loved, she lifted her eyes and saw him standing quite close to her. He was leaning against a gate which gave egress from the moor into an adjacent pasture field towards which her steps were bent. His arms, loosely folded, rested upon the top of the gate, and he was looking away from her towards the distant vista of sea and cliff. Evidently he had not heard her light footsteps on the springy turf, for he made no movement, but remained absorbed in his thoughts, unconscious of her presence.

Sara halted as though transfixed. For an instant the whole world seemed to rock, and a black mist rose up in front of her, blotting out that solitary figure at the gateway. Her heart beat in great, suffocating throbs, and her throat ached unbearably, as if a hand had closed upon it and were gripping it so tightly that she could not breathe. Then her senses steadied, and her gaze leapt to the face outlined in profile against the cold background of the winter sky.

Her searching eyes, poignantly observant, sensed a subtle difference in it—or, perhaps, less actually a difference than a certain emphasizing of what had been before only latent and foreshadowed. The lean face was still leaner than she had known it, and there were deep lines about the mouth—graven. And the mouth itself held something sternly sweet and austere about the manner of its closing—a severity of self-discipline which one might look to see on the lips of a man who has made the supreme sacrifice of his own will, bludgeoning his desires into submission in response to some finely conceived impulse.

The recognition of this, of the something fine and splendid that had stamped itself on Garth's features, came to Sara in a sudden blazoning flash of recognition. This was not—could not be the face of a weak man or a coward! And for one transcendent moment of glorious belief sheer happiness overwhelmed her.

But, in the same instant, the damning facts stormed up at her—the verdict of the court-martial, the details Elisabeth had supplied, above all, Garth's own inability to deny the charge—and the light of momentary ecstasy flared and went out in darkness.

An inarticulate sound escaped her, forced from her lips by the pang of that sudden frustration of leaping hope, and, hearing it, Garth turned and saw her.

"Sara!" The name rushed from his lips, shaken with a tumult of emotion. And then he was silent, staring at her across the little space that separated them, his hand gripping the topmost bar of the gate as though for actual physical support.

The calm of his face, that lofty serenity which had been impressed upon it, was suddenly all broken up.

"Sara!" he repeated, a ring of incredulity in his tones.

"Yes," she said flatly. "I've come back."

She moved towards him, trying to control the trembling that had seized her limbs.

"I—I've just come back from France," she added, making a lame attempt to speak conventionally.

It was an effort to hold out her hand, and, when his closed around it, she felt her whole body thrill at his touch, just as it had been wont to thrill in those few, short, golden days when their mutual happiness had been undarkened by any shadow from the past. Swiftly, as though all at once afraid, she snatched her hand from his clasp.

"What have you been doing in France?" he asked.

"Nursing," she answered briefly. "Did you think I could stay here and do—nothing, at such a time as this?"

There was accusation in her tone, but if he felt that her speech reflected in any way upon himself, he showed no sign of it. His eyes were roving over her, marking the changes wrought in the year that had passed since they had met—the sharpened contour of her face, the too slender body, the white fragility of the bare hand which grasped the handle of the basket she was carrying.

"You are looking very ill," he said, at last, abruptly.

"I'm not ill," she replied indifferently. "Only a bit over-tired. As soon as I have had a thorough rest I am going back to France."

"You won't go back there again?" he exclaimed sharply. "You're not fit for such work!"

"Certainly I shall go back—as soon as ever Dr. Selwyn will let me. It's little enough to do for the men who are giving—everything!" Suddenly, the pent-up indignation within her broke bounds. "Garth, how can you stay here when men are fighting, dying—out there?" Her voice vibrated with the sense of personal shame which his apathy inspired in her. "Oh!"—as though she feared he might wound her yet further by advancing the obvious excuse—"I know you're past military age. But other men—older men than you—have gone. I know a man of fifty who bluffed and got in! There are heaps of back doors into the Army these days."

"And there's a back door out of it—the one through which I was kicked out!" he retorted, his mouth setting itself in the familiar bitter lines.

The scoffing defiance of his attitude baffled her.

"Don't you want to help your country?" she pleaded. It was horrible to her that he should stand aside—inexplicable except in terms of that wretched business on the Indian Frontier, in the hideous truth of which only his own acknowledgment had compelled her to believe.

He looked at her with hard, indifferent eyes.

"My country made me an outcast," he replied. "I'll remain such."

Somehow, even in her shamed bewilderment and anger, she sensed the hurt that lay behind the curt speech.

"Men who have been cashiered, men who are too old—they're all going back," she urged tremulously, snatching at any weapon that suggested itself.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Let them!"

She stared at him in silence. She felt exactly as though she had been beating against a closed door. With a gesture of hopelessness she turned away, recognizing the futility of pleading with him further.

"One moment"—he stepped in front of her, barring her path. "I want an answer to a question before you go."

There was something of his old arrogance in the demand—the familiar, dominating quality which had always swayed her. Despite herself, she yielded to it now.

"Well?" she said unwillingly. "What is it you wish to know?"

"I want to know if you are engaged to Tim Durward."

For an instant the colour rushed into Sara's white face; then it ebbed away, leaving it paler than before.

"No," she said quietly. "I am not." She lifted her eyes, accusing, passionately reproachful, to his. "How could you—even ask me that? Did you ever believe I loved you?" she went on fiercely. "And if I did—could I care for any one else?"

A look of triumph leapt into his eyes.

"You care still, then?" he asked, and in his voice was blent all the exultation, and the wonder, and the piercing torment of love itself.

Sara felt herself slipping, knew that she was losing her hold of herself. Soon she would be a-wash in a sea of love, helpless to resist as a bit of driftwood, and then the waters would close over her head and she would be drawn down into the depths of shame which yielding to her love for Garth involved.

She must go—leave him while she had the power. Summoning up her strength, she faced him.

"I do," she answered steadily. "But I pray God every night of my life that I may soon cease to care."

And with those few words, limitless in their scorn—for him, and for herself because she still loved him—she turned to go.

But their contempt seemed to pass him by. His eyes burned.

"So Elisabeth has played her stake—and lost!" he muttered to himself. "Ah! Pardon!" he drew aside as she almost brushed past him in her sudden haste to escape—to get away—and stood, with bared head, his eyes fixed on her receding figure.

Soon a bend in the path through the fields hid her from his sight. But, long after she had disappeared, he remained leaning, motionless, against the gateway through which she had passed, his face immobile, twisted and drawn so that it resembled some sculptured mask of Pain, his eyes staring straight in front of him, blank and unseeing.



"Hullo, Trent!"

Miles Herrick, returning from the town to the hospital and taking, like every one else, the short cut across the fields, waved a friendly arm as he caught sight of Garth's figure silhouetted against the sky-line.

Then he drew nearer, and the set, still face of the other filled him with a sudden sense of dismay. There was a new look in it, a kind of dogged hopelessness. It entirely lacked that suggestion of austere sweetness which had made it so difficult to reconcile his smirched reputation with the man himself.

"What is it, Garth?" Instinctively Miles slipped into the more familiar appellation.

Trent looked at him blankly. It seemed as though he had not heard the question, or, at any rate, had not taken in its meaning.

"What did you say?" he muttered, his brows contracting painfully.

Miles slung the various packages with which he was burdened on to the ground, and leaned up leisurely against the gatepost. It was characteristic of him that, although the day was never long enough for the work he crowded into it, he could always find time to give a helping hand to a pal with his back against the wall.

"Out with it, man!" he said. "What's up?"

Slowly recognition came back in the other's eyes.

"What I might have anticipated," he answered, at last, in a curious flat voice, devoid of expression. "I've sunk a degree or two lower in Sara's estimation since the war broke out."

Miles regarded him quietly for a moment, a queer, half-humorous glint in his eyes.

"I suppose she doesn't know you've half-beggared yourself, helping on the financial side?"

"A man could hardly do less, could he?" he returned awkwardly. "But if she did know—which she doesn't—it would make no earthly difference."

"Then—it's because you're not soldiering?"

"Exactly. I've not volunteered."

"Well"—composedly—"why don't you?"

Trent laughed shortly.

"That's my affair."

"With your physique you could wangle the age limit," pursued Miles imperturbably.

"I should have to 'wangle' a good deal more than that,"—harshly. "Have you forgotten that I was chucked from the Army?"

"There's such a thing as enlisting under another name."

"There is—and then of running up against one of the old crowd and being recognized! It isn't so easy to lose your identity. I've had my lesson on that."

Miles looked away quickly. The hard, implacable stare of the other man's eyes, with the blazing defiance, hurt him. It spoke too poignantly of a bitterness that had eaten into the heart. But he had put his hand to the plough, and he refused to turn back.

"Wouldn't it"—he spoke with a sudden gentleness, the gentleness of the surgeon handling a torn limb—"wouldn't it help to straighten things out with Sara?"

"If it did, it would only make matters worse. No. Take it from me, Herrick, that soldiering is the one thing of all others I can't do."

He turned away as though to signify that the discussion was at an end.

"I don't see it," persisted Miles. "On the contrary, it's the one thing that might make her believe in you. In spite of that Indian Frontier business."

Garth swung suddenly round, a dull, dangerous gleam in his eyes. But Miles bore the savage glance serenely. He had applied the spur with intention. The other was suffering—suffering intolerably—in a dumb silence that shut him in alone with his agony. That silence must be broken, no matter what the means.

"You'd wipe out the stigma of cowardice, if you volunteered," he went on deliberately.

Garth laughed derisively.

"Cut it out, Herrick," he flung back. "I'm not a damned story-book hero, out for whitewash and the V.C."

But Miles continued undeterred.

"And you'd convince Sara," he finished quietly.

A stifled exclamation broke from Garth.

"To what end?" he burst out violently. "Can't you realize that's just the one thing in the world forbidden me? Sara is—oh, well, it's impossible to say what she is, but I suppose most good women are half angel. And if I gave her the smallest chance, she'd begin to believe in me again—to ask questions I cannot answer. . . . What's the use? I can't get away from the court-martial and all that followed. I can't clear myself. And I could never offer Sara anything more than a name that has been disgraced—a miserable half-life with a man who can't hold up his head amongst his fellows! Yes"—answering the unspoken question in Herrick's eyes—"I know what you're thinking—that I was willing to marry her once. But I believed, then, that—Garth Trent had cut himself free from the past. Now I know"—more quietly—"that there is no such thing as getting away from the mistakes one has made. . . . I'm tied hand and foot—every way! And it's better Sara should continue to think the worst of me. Then, in the future, she may find some sort of happiness—with Durward, perhaps." His lips greyed a little, but he went on. "The worse she thinks me, the easier it will be for her to cut me out of her life."

"Then do you mean"—Miles spoke very slowly—that you are—deliberately—holding back from soldiering?"

"Quite deliberately!" It was like the snap of a tormented animal, baited beyond bearing. "If I could go with a clean name, as other men can——Good God, man! Do you think I haven't thought it out—knocked my head against every stone wall in the whole damned business?"

Miles was silent. There was so much of truth in all Garth said, so much of warped vision, biased by the man's profound bitterness of soul, that he could find no answer.

After a moment Garth spoke again, jerkily, as though under pressure.

"There's my promise to Elisabeth, as well. That binds me if I were recognized and taxed with my identity. I should have to hold my peace—and stick it all over again! . . . There's a limit to a man's endurance."

Then, after a pause: "If I could go—and be sure of not returning"—grimly—"I'd go to-morrow—the Foreign Legion, anyway. But sometimes a man hasn't even the right to get himself neatly killed out of the way."

"What are you driving at now?"

"I should think it's plain enough! Don't you see what it would mean to Sara if—that—happened? She'd never believe—afterwards—that I'm as black as I'm painted, and I should saddle her with an intolerable burden of self-reproach. No, the Army is a closed door for me. . . . Damn it, Herrick!" with the sudden nervous violence of a man goaded past endurance. "Can't you understand? I ought never to have come into her life at all. I've only messed things up for her—damnably. The least I can do is to clear out of it so that she'll never regret my going. . . . I've gone under, and a man who's gone under had better stay there."

Both men were silent—Trent with the bitter, brooding silence of a man who has battered uselessly against the bars that hem him in, and who at last recognizes that they can never be forced asunder, Herrick trying to focus his vision to that of the man beside him.

"No"—Garth spoke with a finality there was no disputing—"I've been buried three-and-twenty years, and my resurrection hasn't been exactly a success. There's no place in the world for me unless some one else pays the price. It's better for every one concerned that I should—stay buried."



CHAPTER XXXIII

OVER THE MOUNTAINS

"He didn't do it!"

Suddenly, Sara found herself saying the words aloud in the darkness and solitude of the night.

Since her meeting with Garth, on her way to the hospital, every hour had been an hour of conflict. That brief, strained interview had shaken her to the depths of her being, and, unable to sleep when night came, she had lain, staring wide-eyed into the dark, struggling against its influence.

Little enough had been said. It had been the silences, the dumb, passion-filled silences, vibrant with all that must not be spoken, which had tried her endurance to the utmost, and she had fled, at last, incontinently, because she had felt her resolution weakening each moment she and Garth remained together—because, with him beside her, the love against which she had been fighting for twelve long months had wakened into fierce life again, beating down her puny efforts to withstand it.

The mere sound of his voice, the lightest touch of his hand, had power to thrill her from head to foot, to rock those barriers which his own act had forced her to build up between them.

The recollection of that one perfect moment, when the serene austerity of his face had given the lie to that of which he was accused, lingered with her, a faint elusive thread of hope which would not leave her, urging, suggesting, combating the hard facts to which he himself had given ruthless confirmation.

Almost without her cognizance, Sara's characteristic, vehement belief in whomsoever she loved—stunned at the first moment of Elisabeth's revelation—had been gradually creeping back to feeble, halting life, weakened at times by the mass of evidence arrayed against it, yet still alive—growing and strengthening secretly within her as an unborn babe grows and strengthens.

And since that moment on the moor, when her eyes had searched Garth's face—his face with the mask off—the dormant belief within her had sprung into conscious knowledge.

Throughout the long hours of the night she had fought against it, deeming it but the passionate outcome of her love for the man himself. She wanted to believe him innocent; it was only her love for him which had raised this phantom doubt of the charges brought against him; the wish had been father to the thought. So she told herself, struggling conscientiously against that to which she longed to yield.

And then, making a mockery of the hateful thing of which he had been accused, her individual knowledge of Garth himself rose up and confronted her accusingly.

Nothing that she had ever known of him had pointed to any lack of courage. It had been on no sudden, splendid impulse of a moment that he had plunged into the sea and fought that treacherous, racing tide off Devil's Hood Island. Quite composedly, deliberately, he had calculated the risks—and taken them!

Once more, she recalled the vision of his face as she had seen it yesterday, in that instant before he had perceived her nearness to him—strong and steadfast, imprinted with a disciplined nobility—and the repudiation of his dishonour leapt spontaneously from her lips.

"He didn't do it!"

She had spoken involuntarily, the thought rushing into words before she was aware, and the sound of her own voice in the darkness startled her. It seemed almost like a voice from some Otherwhere, authoritatively assuring her of all she had ached to believe.

She lay back on her pillows, smiling a little at the illusion. But the sense of peace, of blessed assuredness, remained with her. She had struggled through the darkness of those bitter months of unbelief, and now she had come out into the light on the other side. She felt dreamily contented and at rest, and presently she fell asleep, trustfully, as a little child may sleep, the smile still on her lips.



With morning came reaction—blank, sordid reaction, depressing her unutterably.

Amid the score of trifling details incidental to the day's arrangements, with the usual uninspiring conversation prevalent at the breakfast-table going on around her, the mood of the previous night, informed, as it had been, with that triumphant sense of exaltation, slipped from her like a garment.

Supposing she were to tell them—to tell Selwyn and Molly—that, without any further evidence, she was convinced of Garth's innocence? Why, they would think she had gone mad! Regretfully, with infinite pain it might be, but still none the less conclusively, they had accepted the fact of his guilt. And indeed, what else could be expected of them, seeing that he had himself acknowledged it?

And yet—that inner feeling of belief which had stirred into new life refused to be repressed.

Mechanically she went about the small daily duties which made up life at Sunnyside—interviewed Jane Crab, read the newspapers to Mrs. Selwyn, accomplished the necessary shopping in the town, each and all with a mind that was only superficially concerned with the matter in hand, while, behind this screen of commonplace routine, she felt as though her soul were struggling impotently to release itself from the bonds which had bound it in a tyranny of anguish for twelve long months.

In the afternoon, she paid a visit to the Convalescent Hospital. She made a practice of going there at least once a day and giving what assistance she could. Frequently she relieved Miles of part of his secretarial work, or checked through with him the invoices of goods received. There were always plenty of odd jobs to be done, and, after her strenuous work in France, she found it utterly impossible to settle down to the life of masterly inactivity which Selwyn had prescribed for her.

Audrey greeted her with a little flurry of excitement.

"Do you know that there was a Zepp over Oldhampton last night?" she asked, as they went upstairs together. "Did you hear it?"

Sara shook her head. The memory of the previous night surged over her like the memory of a vivid dream—the absolute assurance it had brought her of Garth's innocence, an assurance which had grown vague and doubtful with the daylight, just as the happenings of a dream grow blurred and indistinct.

"No, I didn't hear anything," she replied absently. "Did they do much damage? I suppose they were after the munitions factory?"

"Yes. They dropped one bomb, that's all. It fell in a field, luckily. But goodness knows how they got over without any one's spotting them! Everybody's asking where our search-lights were. As for our anti-aircraft guns, they've never had the opportunity yet to do anything more than try our nerves by practicing! And last night a golden opportunity came and went unobserved."

"The milkman was babbling to Jane about Zeppelins this morning, but I thought it was probably only the result of overnight potations at 'The Jolly Sailorman.'"

"No, it was the real thing—'made in Germany,'" smiled Audrey. "I begin to feel as if we were quite the hub of the universe, now that the Zepps have acknowledged our existence."

They paused outside the door of the room allotted to her husband's activities.

"Miles will be glad to see you to-day," she pursued. "He's bemoaning a new manifestation of war-fever among the feminine population of Monkshaven. Go in to him, will you? I must run off—I've got a million things to see to. You're not looking very fit to-day"—suddenly observing the other's white face and shadowed eyes. "Are you feeling up to work?"

Sara nodded indifferently.

"Quite," she said. "I shouldn't have come otherwise."

Miles welcomed her joyfully.

"Bless you, my dear!" he exclaimed. "You're the very woman I wanted to see. I'm snowed under with fool letters from females anxious to entertain 'our poor, brave, wounded officers.' Head 'em off, will you?" He thrust a bundle of letters into her hands. Then, as she moved toward the windows, and the cold, searching light of the wintry sunshine fell full on her face, his voice altered. "What is it? What has happened, Sara?" he asked quickly.

She looked at him dumbly. Her lips moved, but no sound came. The sudden question, accompanied by the swift, penetrating glance of Miles's brown eyes, had taken her off her guard.

He limped across to her.

"Not a stroke of work for you to-day," he said decisively, taking the bundle of letters out of her hands. "Now tell me what's wrong?"

She looked away from him, a slow, shamed red creeping into her face. At last—

"I've seen Garth," she said very low.

Herrick nodded. He knew what that meeting had meant to one of these two friends of his. Now he was to see the reverse of the medal. He waited, his silence sympathetic and far more helpful than any eager, probing question, however well-intentioned.

"Miles," she burst out suddenly, "I'm—I'm wretched!"

"How's that?" He did not make the mistake of attributing her outburst to a transient mood of depression. Something deeper lay behind it.

"Since I saw Garth yesterday I've been asking myself whether—whether I've been doing him a ghastly injustice"—she moistened her dry lips—"whether he was really guilty of—running away."

"Ah!" Miles stuffed his hands in his pockets and limped the length of the room and back. In that moment, he realized something of the maddening, galling restraint of the bondage under which Garth Trent had lived for years—the bondage of silence, and, within his pickets, his hands were clenched when he halted again at Sara's side.

"Why?" he shot at her.

She hesitated. Then she caught her breath a little hysterically.

"Why—because—because I just can't believe it! . . . I've seen a lot since I went away. I've seen brave men—and I've seen men . . . who were afraid." She turned her head aside. "They—the ones who were afraid—didn't look . . . as Garth looks."

Herrick made no comment. He put a question.

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I expect you think I'm a fool? I've nothing to go on—on the contrary, I've Garth's own admission that—that he was cashiered. And yet——Oh! Miles, if he were only doing anything—now—it would be easier to believe in him! But—he holds absolutely aloof. It's as though he were afraid—still."

"Have you ever thought"—Herrick spoke slowly, without looking at her—"what this year of war must have meant to a man who has been a soldier—and is one no longer?" His eyes came back to her face meditatively.

"How—what do you mean?" she whispered.

"You've only got to look at the man to know what I mean. I think—since the war broke out—that Trent has been through the bitterness of death."

"But—but he could have enlisted—got in somehow—under another name, had he wanted to fight. Or he might have gone out and driven an ambulance car—as Lester Kent did."

Sara was putting to Herrick the very arguments which had arisen in her own mind to confound the intuitive belief of which she had been conscious since that moment of inward revelation on Crabtree Moor—putting them forward in all their repulsive ugliness of fact, in the desperate hope that Herrick might find some way to refute them.

"Some men might have done, perhaps," answered Miles quietly. "But not a man of Trent's temperament. Some trees bend in a storm—and when the worst of it is past, they spring erect again. Some can't; they break."

The words recalled to Sara's mind with sudden vividness the last letter Patrick Lovell had ever written her—the one which he had left in the Chippendale bureau for her to receive after his death. He had applied almost those identical words to the Malincourt temperament, of which he had recognized the share she had inherited. And she realized that her guardian and Miles Herrick had been equally discerning. Though differing in its effect upon each of them, consequent upon individual idiosyncrasy, the fact remained that she and Garth were both "breaking" beneath the strain which destiny had imposed on them.

With the memory of Patrick's letter came an inexpressible longing for the man himself—for the kindly, helping hand which he would have stretched out to her in this crisis of her life. She felt sure that, had he been beside her now, his shrewd counsel would have cleared away the mists of doubt and indecision which had closed about her.

But since he was no longer there to be appealed to, she had turned instinctively to Herrick, and, somehow, he had failed her. He had not given her a definite expression of his own belief. She had been humanly craving to hear that he, too, believed in Garth, notwithstanding the evidence against him—that he had some explanation to offer of that ghastly tragedy of the court-martial episode. And instead, he had only hazarded some tolerant suggestions—sympathetic to Garth, it is true, but not carrying with them the vital, unqualified assurance she had longed to hear.

In spite of this, she knew that Herrick's friendship with Garth had remained unbroken by the knowledge of the Indian Frontier story. The personal relations of the two men were unchanged, and she felt as though Miles were withholding something from her, observing a reticence for which she could find no explanation. He had been very kind and understanding—it would not have been Miles had he been otherwise—but he had not helped her much. In some curious way she felt as though he had thrown the whole onus of coming to a decision, unaided by advice, upon her shoulders.

She returned to Sunnyside oppressed with a homesick longing for Patrick. The two years which had elapsed since his death had blunted the edge of her sorrow—as time inevitably must—but she still missed the shrewd, kindly, worldly-wise old man unspeakably, and just now, thrown back upon herself in some indefinable way by Miles's attitude, her whole heart cried out for that other who was gone.

She wondered if he knew how much she needed him. She almost believed that he must know—wherever he might be now, she felt that Patrick would never have forgotten the child of the woman whom, in this world, he had loved so long and faithfully.

With an instinctive craving for some tangible memory of him, she unlocked the leather case which held her mother's miniature, together with the last letter which Patrick had ever written; and, unfolding the letter, began to read it once again.

Somehow, there seemed comfort in the very wording of it, in every little characteristic phrase that had been Patrick's, in the familiar appellation, "Little old pal," which he had kept for her alone.

All at once her fingers gripped the letter more tightly, her attentions riveted by a certain passage towards the end.

". . . And when love comes to you, never forget that it is the biggest thing in the world, the one altogether good and perfect gift. Don't let any twopenny-halfpenny considerations of worldly advantage influence you, or the tittle-tattle of other folks, and even if it seems that something unsurmountable lies between you and the fulfillment of love, go over it, or round it, or through it! If it's real love, your faith must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way—or to go over them."

Had Patrick foreseen the exact circumstances in which his "little old pal" would one day find herself, he could not have written anything more strangely applicable.

Sara sat still, every nerve of her taut and strung. She felt as though she had laid bare the whole of her trouble, revealed her inmost soul in all its anguished perplexity, to those shrewd blue eyes which had been wont to see so clearly through externals, piercing infallibly to the very heart of things.

Patrick had always possessed that supreme gift of being able to separate the grain from the chaff—to distinguish unerringly between essentials and non-essentials, and now, in the quiet, wise counsel of an old letter, Sara found an answer to all the questionings that had made so bitter a thing of life.

It was almost as if some one had torn down a curtain from before her eyes, rent asunder a veil which had been distorting and obscuring the values of things.

Mountains! There were mountains indeed betwixt her and Garth—and there was no way round them or through them! But now—now she would go over them—go straight ahead, unregarding of the mountains between, to where Garth and love awaited her.

No man is all angel—or all devil. Supposing Garth had been guilty of cowardice, had had his one moment of weakness? She no longer cared! He was hers, her lover, alike in his weakness and in his strength. She had known men in France shrink in terror at the evil droning of a shell, and then die selflessly that others might live.

"Your faith must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way—or to go over them," Patrick had written.

And Sara, hiding her face in her hands, thanked God that now, at last, her faith was big enough, and that love—"the one altogether good and perfect gift"—was still hers if she would only go over the mountains.



CHAPTER XXXIV

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE

"GARTH TRENT, COWARD."

The words, in staring white capital letters, had been chalked up by some one on the big wooden double-doors that shut the world out from Far End.

Sara stood quite still, gazing at them fixedly, and a tense white-heat of anger flared up within her. Who had dared to put such an insult upon the man she loved?

"Coward!" No one had ever actually applied that term to Garth in her hearing. They had skirted delicately round it, or wrapped up its meaning in some less harsh-sounding tangle of phrases, and although she had bitterly used the word herself, now that the opprobrious expression publicly confronted her, writ large by some unfriendly hand, she was swept by a sheer fury of indignant denial. It roused in her the immediate instinct to defend, to range herself unmistakably on Garth's side against a world of traducers.

With a faint smile of self-mockery, she realized that had this flagrant insult been leveled at him in the beginning, had her first knowledge of the black shadow which hung over him been thus brutally flung at her, instead of diffidently, reluctantly broken to her by Elisabeth, she would probably, with the instinctive partisanship of woman for her mate, have utterly refused to credit it—against all reason and all proof.

She wondered who could have done this ting, nailed this insult to Garth's very door. The illiterate characters stamped it as the work of some one in the lower walks of life, and, with a frown of annoyance, Sara promptly—and quite correctly—ascribed it to Black Brady.

"I never forgits to pay back," he had told her once, belligerently. Probably this was his notion of getting even with the man who had prosecuted him for poaching. But had Brady realized that, in retaliating upon Trent, he would be giving pain to his beloved Sara, whom he had grown to regard with a humble, dog-like devotion, he would certainly have refrained from recording his vengeance upon Garth's gateway.

Surmising that Garth could not have seen the offending legend—or it would scarcely have been left for all who can to read—Sara whipped out her handkerchief and set to work to rub it off. He should not see it if she could help it!

But Black Brady had done his work very thoroughly, and she was still diligently scrubbing at it with an inadequate piece of cambric when she heard steps behind her, and wheeling round, found herself confronted by Garth himself.

His eyes rested indifferently and without surprise upon the chalked-up words, then turned to Sara's face inquiringly.

"Why are you doing that?" he asked. "Is—cleaning gates the latest form of war-work?"

Sara, her face scarlet, answered reluctantly.

"I didn't want you to see it."

A curious expression flashed into his eyes.

"I saw it—two hours ago."

"And you left it there?"—with amazement.

"Why not? It's true, isn't it?"

And in that moment the long struggle in Sara's heart ended, and she answered out of the fullness of the faith that was in her.

"No! It is not true! I've been a fool to believe it for an instant. But I'm one no longer. I don't believe it." She paused, then, very deliberately and steadily, she put her question.

"Garth—tell me, were you ever guilty of cowardice?"

"The court-martial thought so."

Sara's foot tapped impatiently on the ground.

"Please answer my question," she said quickly.

But he remained unmoved.

"Elisabeth Durward has surely supplied you with all the information on that subject which you require," he said in expressionless tones, and Sara was conscious anew of the maddening feeling of impotence with which a contest of wills between herself and Garth never failed to imbue her.

"Garth"—there was appeal in her voice, yet it was still very steady and determined—"I want to know what you say about it. What Elisabeth—or any one else—may say, doesn't matter any longer."

Something in the quiet depth of emotion in her voice momentarily broke through his guard. He made an involuntary movement towards her, then checked himself, and, with an effort, resumed his former detached manner.

"More important than anything either I, or Elisabeth, can say, is the verdict of the court," he answered.

The deadly calm of his voice ripped away her last remnant of composure.

"The verdict of the court!" she burst out. "Damn the verdict of the court!"

"I have done—many a time!"—bitterly.

"Garth," she came a step nearer to him and her sombre eyes blazed into his. "I will have an answer! For God's sake, don't fence with me any longer! . . . There have been misunderstandings enough, reticences enough, between us. For this once, let us be honest with each other. I pretended I didn't care—I pretended I could go on living, believing you to be what—what they have called you. And I can't! . . . I can't go on. . . . I can't bear it any longer. You must answer me! Were you guilty?"

He was white to the lips by the time she had finished, and his eyes held a look of dumb torture. Twice he essayed to answer her, but no sound came.

At last he turned away, as though the passionate question in her face—the eager, hungry longing to hear her faith confirmed—were more than he could bear.

"I cannot deny it." The words came hoarsely, almost whispered.

Her eyes never left his face.

"I didn't ask you to deny it," she persisted doggedly. "I asked you—were you guilty?"

Again there fell as heavy silence. Then, reluctantly, as if the admission were dragged from him, he spoke.

"I'm afraid I can give you no other answer to that question."

A light like the tender, tremulous shining of dawn broke across Sara's face.

"Then you weren't guilty!" she exclaimed, and there was a deep, surpassing joy in her shaken tones. "I knew it! I was sure of it. Oh! Garth, Garth, what a fool I've been! And oh! My dear, why did you do it? Why did you let me go on thinking you—what it almost killed me to think?"

He stared down at her with wondering, uncertain eyes.

"But I've just told you that I can't deny it!"

She smiled at him—a smile of absolute content, with a gleam of humour at the back of it.

"I didn't ask you to deny it. I asked you to own to it; I tried to make you—every way. And you can't!"

"But—"

She laid her hand across his mouth—laughing the tender, triumphant laughter of a woman who has won, and knows that she has.

"You needn't blacken yourself any longer on my account, Garth. I shall never again believe anything that you may say against—the man I love."

She stood leaning a little towards him, surrender in every line of her slender body, and her face was like a white flame—transfigured, radiant with some secret, mystic glory of love's imparting.

With an inarticulate cry he opened wide his arms and she went to him—swiftly, unerringly, like a homing bird—and, as he folded her close against his breast and laid his lips to hers, all the hunger and the longing of the empty past was in his kiss. For the moment, pain and bitterness and regret were swept away in that ecstasy of reunion.



Presently, with a little sigh of spent rapture, she leaned away from him.

"To think we've wasted a whole year," she said regretfully. "Garth, I wish I had trusted you better!" There was a sweet humility of repentance in her tones.

"I don't see why you should trust me now," he rejoined quietly. "The facts remain as before."

"Only that the verdict of the court-martial was wrong," she said swiftly. "There was some horrible mistake. I am sure of it—I know it! Garth!"—after a moment's pause—"are you going to tell me everything? I have the right to know—haven't I?—now that I'm going to be your wife."

She felt the clasp of his arms relax, and, looking up quickly, she saw his face suddenly revert to its old lines of weariness. Slowly, reluctantly, he drew away from her.

"Garth!" There was a shrilling note of apprehension in her voice. "Garth! What is it? Why do you look like that?"

It was a full minute before he answered. When he did, he spoke heavily, as one who knows that his next words will dash all the joy out of life.

"Because," he said quietly, "I can no more tell you anything now than I could before. I can't clear myself, Sara!"

Her eyes were fixed on his.

"Do you mean—you will never be able to?" she asked incredulously.

"Yes, I mean that."

"Answer me one more question, Garth. Is it that you cannot—or will not clear yourself?"

"I must not," he replied steadily. "I am not the only one concerned in the matter. There is some one to whom I owe it to be silent. Honour forbids that I should even try to clear myself. Now you know all—all that I can ever tell you."

"Who is it?" The question leaped from her, and Garth's answer came with an irrevocability of refusal there was no combating.

"That I cannot tell you—or any one."

Sara's mouth twitched. Her face was very white, but her eyes were shining.

"And you have borne this—all these years?" she said. "You have known that you could clear yourself and have refrained?"

"There was no choice," he answered quietly. "I took on a certain liability—years ago, and because it has turned out to be a much heavier liability than I anticipated gives me no excuse for repudiating it now."

For a moment Sara hid her face in her hands. When she uncovered it again there was something almost akin to awe in her eyes.

"Will you ever forgive me, Garth, for doubting you?" she whispered.

"Forgive you?" He smiled. "What else could you have done, sweetheart? I don't know, even now, why you believe in me," he added wonderingly.

"Just because—" she began, and fell silent, realizing that her belief had no reason, but was founded on the intuitive knowledge of a love that has suffered and won out on the other side.

When next she spoke it was with the simple, frank directness characteristic of her.

"Thank God that I can prove that I do trust you—absolutely. When will you marry me, Garth?"

"When will I marry you?" He repeated the words slowly, as though they conveyed no meaning to him.

"Yes. I want every one to know, to see that I believe in you. I want to stand at your side—go shares. Do you remember, once, how we settled that married life meant going shares in everything—good and bad?" She smiled a little at the remembrance drawn from the small store of memories that was all her few days of unclouded love had given her. "I want—my share, Garth."

For a moment he was silent. Then he spoke, and the quiet finality of his tones struck her like a blow.

"We can never marry, Sara."

"Never—marry!" she repeated dazedly. Quick fear seized her, and she rushed on impetuously: "Then you haven't forgiven me, after all—you don't believe that I trust you! Oh! How can I make you know that I do? Garth—"

"Oh, my dear," he interrupted swiftly. "Don't misunderstand me. I know that you believe in me now—and I thank God for it! And as for forgiveness, as I told you, I have nothing to forgive. You'd have had need of the faith that removes mountains"—Sara started at the repetition of Patrick's very words—"to have believed in me under the circumstances." He paused a moment, and when he spoke again there was something triumphant in his tones—a serene gladness and contentment. "You and I, beloved, are right with each other—now and always. Nothing can ever again come between us to divide us as we have been divided this last year. But, none the less," and his voice took on a steadfast note of resolve, "I cannot marry you. I thought I could—I thought the past had sunk into oblivion, and that I might take the gift of love you offered me. . . . But I was wrong."

"No! No! You were not wrong!" She was clinging to him in a sudden terror that even now their happiness was slipping from them. "The past has nothing to say to you and me. It can't come between us. . . . You have only to take me, Garth"—tremulously. "Let me show that my love is stronger than ill repute. Let me come to you and stand by you as your wife. The past can't hurt us, then!"

He shook his head.

"The past never loses its power to hurt," he answered. "I've learned that. As far as the world you belong to is concerned, I'm finished, and I won't drag the woman I love through the same hell I've been through. That's what it would mean, you know. You would be singled out, pointed at, as the wife of a man who was chucked out of the Service. There would be no place in the world for you. You would be ostracized—because you were my wife."

"I shouldn't care," she urged. "Surely I can bear—what you have borne? . . . I shouldn't mind—anything—so long as we were together."

He drew her close to him, his lips against her hair.

"Beloved!" he said, a great wonder in his voice. "Oh! Little brave thing! What have I ever done that you should love me like that?"

Sara winked away a tear, and a rather tremulous smile hovered round her mouth.

"I don't know, I'm sure," she acknowledged a little shakily. "But I do. Garth, you will marry me?"

He lifted his bent head, his eyes gazing straight ahead of him, as though envisioning the lonely future and defying it.

"No," he said resolutely. "No. God helping me, I will never marry you, Sara. I have—no right to marry. It could only bring you misery. Dear, I must shield you, even from yourself—from your own big, generous impulses which would let you join your life to mine. . . . Love is denied to us—denied through my own act of long ago. But if you'll give me friendship. . . ." She could sense the sudden passionate entreaty behind the words. "Sara! Friendship is worth while—such friendship as ours would be! Are you brave enough, strong enough, to give me that—since I may not ask for more?"

There was a long silence, while Sara lay very still against his breast, her face hidden.

In that silence, her spirit met and faced the ultimate issue—for there was that in Garth's voice which told her that his decision not to marry her was immutable. Could she—oh God!—could she give him what he asked? Give only part to the man to whom she longed to give all that a woman has to give? It would be far easier to go away—to put him out of her life for ever.

And yet—he asked this of her! He needed something that she could still give—the comradeship which was all that they two might ever know of love. . . .

When at last she raised her face to his, it was ashen, but her small chin was out-thrust, her eyes were like stars, and the grip of her slim hands on his shoulders was as iron.

"I'm strong enough to give you anything that you want," she said quietly.

She had made the supreme sacrifice; she was ready to be his friend.



A sad and wistful gravity hung about their parting. Their lips met and clung together, but it was in a kiss of renunciation, not of passion.

He held her in his arms a moment longer.

"Never forget I'm loving you—always," he said steadily. "Call me your friend—but remember, in my heart I shall always be your lover."

Her eyes met his, unflinching, infinitely faithful.

"And I—I, too, shall be loving you," she answered, simply. "Always, Garth—always."



CHAPTER XXXV

OUT OF THE NIGHT

Tim was home on sick leave, and, after two perfect weeks of reunion, Elisabeth had written to ask if he might come down to Sunnyside, suggesting that the sea-breezes might advance his convalescence.

"I wonder Mrs. Durward cares to spare him," commented Selwyn in some surprise. "It seems out of keeping with her general attitude. However, we shall be delighted to have him here. Write and say so, will you, Sara?"

Sara acquiesced briefly, flushing a little. She thought she could read the motive at the back of Elisabeth's proposal—the spirit which, putting up a gallant fight even in the very face of defeat, could make yet a final effort to secure success by throwing Tim and the woman he loved together in the dangerously seductive intimacy of the same household.

But Sara had no fear that Tim would avail himself of the opportunity thus provided in the way Elisabeth doubtless hoped he might. That matter had been finally settled between herself and him before he went to France, and she knew that he would never again ask her to be his wife. So she wrote to him serenely, telling him to come down to Monkshaven as soon as he liked; and a few days later found him installed at Sunnyside, nominally under Dr. Selwyn's care.

He was the same unaffected, spontaneous Tim as of yore, and hugely embarrassed by any reference to his winning of the Military Cross, firmly refusing to discuss the manner of it, even with Sara.

"I just got on with my job—like dozens of other fellows," was all he would say.

It was from a brother officer that Sara learned, later, than Tim had "got on with his job" under a hellish enemy fire, in spite of being twice wounded; and had thus saved the immediate situation in his vicinity—and, incidentally, the lives of many of his comrades.

He seemed to Sara to have become at once both older and younger than in former days. He had all the hilarious good spirits evinced by nine out of ten of the boys who came home on leave—the cheery capacity to laugh at the hardships and dangers of the front, to poke good-natured fun at "old Fritz" and to make a jest of the German shells and the Flanders mud, treating the whole great adventure of war as though it were the finest game invented.

Yet back of the mirth and laughter in the blue eyes lurked something new and strange and grave—inexpressibly touching—that indefinable something which one senses shrinkingly in the young eyes of the boys who have come back.

It hurt Sara somehow—that look of which she caught glimpses now and then, in quiet moments, and she set herself to drive it away, or, at least, to keep it at bay as much as possible, by filling every available moment with occupation or amusement.

"I don't want him to think about what it was like—out there," she told Molly. "His eyes make my heart ache, sometimes. They're too young to have seen—such things. Suggest something we can play at to-day!"

So they threw themselves, heart and soul, into the task of entertaining Tim, and, since he was very willing to be entertained, the weeks at Sunnyside slipped by in a little whirl of gaiety, winding up with a badminton tournament, at which Tim—whose right arm had not yet quite recovered from the effects of the German bullet it had stopped—played a left-handed game, and triumphantly maneuvered himself and his partner into the semi-finals.

Probably—leniently handicapped, as they were, in the circumstances—they would have won the tournament, but that, unluckily, in leaping to reach a shuttle soaring high above his head, Tim somehow missed his footing and came down heavily, with his leg twisted underneath him.

"Broken ankle," announced Selwyn briefly, when he had made his examination.

Tim opened his eyes—he had lost consciousness, momentarily, from the pain.

"Damn!" he observed succinctly. "That'll make it the very devil of a time before I can get back to France!" Then, to Sara, who could be heard murmuring something about writing to Elisabeth: "Not much, old thing, you don't! She'd fuss herself, no end. Just write—and say—it's a sprain." And he promptly fainted again.

They got him back to Sunnyside while he was still unconscious, and when he returned to an intelligent understanding of material matters, he found himself in bed, with a hump-like excrescence in front of him keeping the weight of the bedclothes from the injured limb.

"Did I faint?" he asked morosely.

"Yes. Lucky you did, too," responded Sara cheerfully. "Doctor Dick rigged your ankle up all nice and comfy without your being any the wiser."

"Fainted—like a girl—over a broken ankle, my hat!"—with immense scorn.

Sara was hard put to it not to laugh outright at his face of disgust.

"You might remember that you're not strong yet," she suggested soothingly.

They talked for a little, and presently Tim, whose eyelids had been blinking somnolently for some time, gave vent to an unmistakable yawn.

"I'm—I'm confoundedly sleepy," he murmured apologetically.

"Then go to sleep," came promptly from Sara. "It's quite the best thing you can do. I'll run off and write a judicious letter to Elisabeth—about your sprain"—smiling.

With a glance round to see that he had candle, matches, and a hand-bell within reach, she turned out the lamp and slipped quietly away. Tim was asleep almost before she had quitted the room.



It was several hours later when Sara sat up in bed, broad awake, in response to the vigorous shaking that some one was administering to her.

She opened her eyes to the yellow glare of a candle. Behind the glare materialized a vision of Jane Crab, attired in a red flannel dressing-gown, and with her hair tightly strained into four skimpy plaits which stuck out horizontally from her head like the surviving rays of a badly damaged halo.

"Miss Sara! Miss Sara!" She apostrophized the rudely awakened sleeper in a sibilant whisper, as though afraid of being overheard. "Get up, quick! They 'Uns is 'ere!"

"Who is here?" exclaimed Sara, somewhat startled.

"The Zepps, miss—the Zepps! The guns are firing off every minute or two. There!"—as the blurred thunder of anti-aircraft guns boomed in the distance. "There they go again!"

Sara leaped out of bed in an instant, hastily pulling on a fascinating silk kimono and thrusting her bare feet into a pair of scarlet Turkish slippers.

"One may as well die tidy," she reflected philosophically. Then, turning to Jane—

"Where's the doctor?" she demanded.

"Trying to get the mistress downstairs. She's that scared, she won't budge from her bed."

Sara giggled—Jane's face was very expressive.

"Well, I'm going into Mr. Durward's room," she announced. "We shall see better there."

Jane's little beady eyes glittered.

"Aye, I'd like to see them at their devil's work," she allowed fondly, with a threatening "Just-let-me-catch-them-at-it!" intonation in her voice.

Sara laughed, and they both repaired to Tim's room, encountering Molly on the way and sweeping her along in their train. They found Tim volubly cursing his inability to get up and "watch the fun."

"Look out and tell me if you can see the blighters," he commanded.

As Sara threw open the window, a dull, thudding sound came up to them from the direction of Oldhampton. There was a sullen menace in the distance-dulled reverberation.

Molly gurgled with the nervous excitement of a first experience under fire.

"That's a bomb!" she whispered breathlessly.

She, and Sara, and Jane Crab wedged themselves together in the open window and leaned far out, peering into the moonless dark. As they watched, a search-light leapt into being, and a pencil of light moved flickeringly across the sky. Then another and another—sweeping hither and thither like the blind feelers of some hidden octopus seeking its prey. There was something horribly uncanny in those long, straight shafts of light wavering uncertainly across the dense darkness of the night sky.

"Can you see the Zepp?" demanded Tim, with lively interest, from his bed.

"No, it's pitch black—too dark to see a thing," replied Sara.

Exactly as she spoke, a brilliant light hung for a moment suspended in the dark arch of the sky, then shivered into a blaze of garish effulgence, girdling the countryside and illuminating every road and building, every field, and tree, and ditch, as brightly as though it were broad daylight.

"A star-shell!" gasped Molly. "What a beastly thing! Positively"—giggling nervously—"I believe they can see right inside this room!"

"'Tisn't decent!" fulminated Jane indignantly, clutching with modest fingers at her scanty dressing-gown and straining it tightly across her chest whilst she backed hastily from the vicinity of the window. "Lightin' up sudden like that in the middle of the night! I feel for all the world as though I hadn't got a stitch on me! Come away from the window, do, miss——"

The light failed as suddenly as it had flared, and a warning crash, throbbing up against their ears, startled her into silence.

"That's a trifle too near to be pleasant," exclaimed Tim sharply. "Go downstairs, you three! Do you hear?"

Simultaneously, Selwyn shouted from below—

"Come downstairs! Come down at once! Quick, Sara! I'm coming up to carry Tim down—and Minnie won't stay alone. Come on!"

Obedient to something urgent and imperative in the voices of both men—something that breathed of danger—the three women hastened from the room. Jane's candle flared and went out in the draught from the suddenly opened door, and in the smothering darkness they stumbled pell-mell down the stairs.

A dim light burning in the hall showed them Mrs. Selwyn cowering against her husband, her face hidden, sobbing hysterically, and in a moment Sara had taken Dick's place, wrapping her strong arms about the shuddering woman.

"Go on!" she whispered to him. "Go and get Tim down!"

He nodded, releasing himself with gentle force from his wife's clinging fingers, which had closed upon his arm like a vise.

Immediately she lifted up her voice in a thin, querulous shriek—

"No! Dick, Dick—don't leave me! Dick"—



. . . And then it came—sped from that hovering Hate which hung above—dropping soundlessly, implacable through the utter darkness of the night and crashing into devilish life against a corner of the house.

Followed by a terrible flash and roar—a chaos of unimaginable sound. It seemed as though the whole world had split into fragments and were rocketing off into space; and, in quick succession, came the rumble of falling beams and masonry, and the dense dust of disintegrated plaster mingling with the fumes of high explosive.

Sara was conscious of being shot violently across the hall, and then everything went out in illimitable black darkness.



CHAPTER XXXVI

"FROM SUDDEN DEATH——"

"Sara! Sara! For God's sake, open your eyes!"

The anguished tones pierced through the black curtain which had suddenly cut away the outer world from Sara's consciousness, and she opened her eyes obediently, to find herself looking straight into Garth's face bent above her—a sickly white in the yellow glare of the hurricane lamp he was holding.

"Are you hurt?" His voice came again insistently, sharp with hideous fear.

She sat up, breathing rather fast.

"No," she said, as though surprised. "I'm not hurt—not the least bit."

With Garth's help, she struggled to her feet and stood upright—rather shakily, it is true, but still able to accomplish the feat without much difficulty. She began to laugh weakly—a little helplessly.

"I think—I think I've only had my wind knocked out," she said. Then, as gradually the comprehension of events returned to her: "The others? Who's hurt? Oh, Garth! Is any one—killed?"

"No, no one, thank God!" He reassured her hastily. His arm went round her, and for a moment their lips met in a silent passion of thanksgiving.

"But you—how did you come here?" she asked, as they drew apart once more. "You . . . weren't . . . here?"—her brows contracting in a puzzled frown as she endeavoured to recall the incidents immediately preceding the bombing of the house. "We'd—we'd just gone to bed."

"I was dining with the Herricks. The raid began just as I was leaving them, so Judson and I drove straight on here instead of going home."

Sara pressed his hand.

"Bless you, dear!" she whispered quickly. Then, recollection returning more completely: "Tim? Is Tim safe?"