“Since you don’t know him, you can hardly pronounce an opinion.”

A whimsical smile, touched with sadness, flitted across Tim’s face.

“I know Sara,” was all he said.

“Sara is given to idealizing the people she cares for,” rejoined Elisabeth.

She spoke quietly, but her expression was curiously intent.  It was as though she were gathering together her forces, concentrating them towards some definite purpose, veiled in the inscrutable depths of those strange eyes of hers.

“I find it difficult to forgive her,” she said at last.

“That’s not like you, mother.”

“It is—­just like me,” she responded, a tone of half-tender mockery in her voice.  “Naturally I find it difficult to forgive the woman who has hurt my son.”

Tim answered her out of the fullness of the queer new wisdom with which love had endowed him.

“A man would rather be hurt by the woman he loves than humoured by the woman he doesn’t love,” he said quietly.

And Elisabeth, understanding, held her peace.

She had been very controlled, very wise and circumspect in her dealing with Tim, conscious of raw-edged nerves that would bear but the lightest of handling.  But it was another woman altogether who, half-an-hour later, faced Geoffrey Durward in the seclusion of his study.

The two moving factors in Elisabeth’s life had been, primarily, her love for her husband, and, later on, her love for Tim, and into this later love was woven all the passionately protective instinct of the maternal element.  She was the type of woman who would have plucked the feathers from an archangel’s wing if she thought they would contribute to her son’s happiness; and now, realizing that the latter was threatened by the fact that his love for Sara had failed to elicit a responsive fire, she felt bitterly resentful and indignant.

“I tell you, Geoffrey,” she declared in low, forceful tones, “she shall marry Tim—­she shall!  I will not have his beautiful young life marred and spoilt by the caprices of any woman.”

Major Durward looked disturbed.

“My dear, I shouldn’t call Sara in the least a capricious woman.  She knows her own heart—­”

“So does Tim!” broke in Elisabeth.  “And, if I can compass it, he shall have his heart’s desire.”

Her husband shook his head.

“You cannot force the issue, my dear.”

“Can I not?  There’s little a woman cannot do for husband or child!  I tell you, Geoffrey—­for you, or for Tim, to give you pleasure, to buy you happiness, I would sacrifice anybody in the world!”

She stood in front of him, her beautiful eyes glowing, and her voice was all shaken and a-thrill with the tumult of emotion that had gripped her.  There was something about her which suggested a tigress on the defensive—­at bay, shielding her young.

Durward looked at her with kind, adoring eyes.