“Then”—­she spoke rather low—­“was it conscience pointing you—­away from Sunnyside?”

His hazel eyes flashed over her face.

“Perhaps it was—­discretion,” he suggested.  “Looking in at shop windows when one has an empty purse is a poor occupation—­and one to be avoided.”

“Did you want to come?” she persisted gently.

Half absently he had cut off a piece of dead wood from the rose-bush next him and was twisting it idly to and fro between his fingers.  At her words, the dead wood stem snapped suddenly in his clenched hand.  For an instant he seemed about to make some passionate rejoinder.  Then he slowly unclenched his hand and the broken twig fell to the ground.

“Haven’t I made it clear to you—­yet,” he said slowly, “that what I want doesn’t enter into the scheme of things at all?”

The brief speech held a sense of impending finality, and, in the silence which followed, the eyes of the man and woman met, questioned each other desperately, and answered.

There are moments when modesty is a false quantity, and when the big happinesses of life depend on a woman’s capacity to realize this and her courage to act upon it.  To Sara, it seemed that such a moment had come to her, and the absolute sincerity of her nature met it unafraid.

“No,” she said quietly.  “You have only made clear to me—­what you want, Garth.  Need we—­pretend to each other any longer?”

“I don’t understand,” he muttered.

“Don’t you?” She drew a littler nearer him, and the face she lifted to his was very white.  But her eyes were shining.  “That night—­when I fell from the car—­I—­I wasn’t unconscious.”

For an instant he stared at her, incredulous.  Then he swung aside a little, his hand gripping the pillar against which he had been leaning till his knuckles showed white beneath the straining skin.

“You—­weren’t unconscious?” he repeated blankly.

“No—­not all the time.  I—­heard—­what you said.”

He seemed to pull himself together.

“Oh, Heaven only knows what I may have said at a moment like that,” he answered carelessly, but his voice was rough and hoarse.  “A man talks wild when the woman he’s with only misses death by a hair’s breath.”

Sara’s lips upturned at the corners in a slow smile—­a smile that was neither mocking, nor tender, nor chiding, but an exquisite blending of all three.  She caught her breath quickly—­Trent could hear its soft sibilance.  Then she spoke.

“Will you marry me, please, Garth?”

He drew back from her, violently, his underlip hard bitten.  At last, after a long silence—­

“No!” he burst out harshly.  “No!  I can’t!”

For an instant she was shaken.  Then, buoyed up by the memory of that night when she had lain in his arms and when the agony of the moment had stripped him of all power to hide his love, she challenged his denial.