“Why not?” Her voice was vibrant.  “You love me!”

“Yes . . .  I love you.”  The words seemed torn from him.

“Then why won’t you marry me?”

It did not seem to her that she was doing anything unusual or unwomanly.  The man she loved had carried his burden single-handed long enough.  The time had come when for his own sake as well as for hers, she must wring the truth from him, make him break through the silence which had long been torturing them both.  Whatever might be the outcome, whether pain or happiness, they must share it.

“Why won’t you marry me, Garth?”

The little question, almost voiceless in its intensity, clamoured loudly at his heart.

“Don’t tempt me!” he cried out hoarsely.  “My God!  I wonder if you know how you are tempting me?”

She came a little closer to him, laying her hand on his arm, while her great, sombre eyes silently entreated him.

As though the touch of her were more than he could bear, his hard-held passion crashed suddenly through the bars his will had set about it.

He caught her in his arms, lifting her sheer off her feet against his breast, whilst his lips crushed down upon her mouth and throat, burned against her white, closed lids, and the hard clasp of his arms about her was a physical pain—­an exquisite agony that it was a fierce joy to suffer.

“Then—­then you do love me?” She leaned against him, breathless, her voice unsteady, her whole slender body shaken with an answering passion.

“Love you?” The grip of his arms about her made response.  “Love you?  I love you with my soul and my body, here and through whatever comes Hereafter.  You are my earth and heaven—­the whole meaning of things—­” He broke off abruptly, and she felt his arms slacken their hold and slowly unclasp as though impelled to it by some invisible force.

“What was I saying?” The heat of passion had gone out of his voice, leaving it suddenly flat and toneless. “‘The whole meaning of things?’” He gave a curious little laugh.  It had a strangled sound, almost like the cry of some tortured thing.  “Then things have no meaning——­”

Sara stood staring at him, bewildered and a little frightened.

“Garth, what is it?” she whispered.  “What has happened?”

He turned, and, walking away from her a few paces, stood very still with his head bent and one hand covering his eyes.

Overhead, the sunshine, filtering in through the green trellis of leafy twigs, flaunted gay little dancing patches of gold on the path below, as the leaves moved flickeringly in the breeze, and where the twisted growth of a branch had left a leafless aperture, it flung a single shaft of quivering light athwart the pergola.  It gleamed like a shining sword between the man and woman, as though dividing them one from the other and thrusting each into the shadows that lay on either hand.

“Garth——­”