“You’re more than half a poet, my Garth!” she told him one day.

“A transcendental fool, in other words,” he amended, smiling.  “Well”—­looking at her oddly—­“perhaps you’re right.  But it’s too late to improve me any.  As the twig is bent, so the tree grows, you know.”

“I don’t want to improve you,” Sara assured him promptly.  “I shouldn’t like you to be in the least bit different from what you are.  It wouldn’t be my Garth, then, at all.”

So they would sit together and talk the foolish, charming nonsense that all lovers have talked since the days of Adam and Eve, whilst from above, the sun shone down and blessed them, and the waves, lapping peacefully on the shore, murmured an obbligato to their love-making.

Looking backward, in the bitter months that followed when her individual happiness had been caught away from her in a whirlwind of calamity, and when the whole world was reeling under the red storm of war, Sara could always remember the utter, satisfying peace of those golden days of early July—­an innocent, unthinking peace that neither she nor the world would ever quite regain.  Afterwards, memory would always have her scarred and bitter place at the back of things.

Sara found no hardship now in receiving the congratulations of her friends—­and they fell about her like rain—­while in the long, intimate talks she had with Garth the fact that he would never speak of the past weighed with her not at all.  She guessed that long ago he had been guilty of some mad, boyish escapade which, with his exaggerated sense of honour and the delicate idealism that she had learned to know as an intrinsic part of his temperamental make-up, he had magnified into a cardinal sin.  And she was content to leave it at that and to accept the present, gathering up with both hands the happiness it held.

She had written to Elisabeth, telling her of her engagement, and, to her surprise, had received the most charming and friendly letter in return.

“Of course,” wrote Elisabeth in her impulsive, flowing hand with its heavy dashes and fly-away dots, “we cannot but wish that it had been otherwise—­that you could have learned to care for Tim—­but you know better than any one of us where your happiness lies, and you are right to take it.  And never think, Sara, that this is going to make any difference to our friendship.  I could read between the lines of your letter that you had some such foolish thought in your mind.  So little do I mean this to make any break between us that—­as I can quite realize it would be too much to ask that you should come to us at Barrow just now—­I propose coming down to Monkshaven.  I want to meet the lucky individual who has won my Sara.  I have not been too well lately—­the heat has tried me—­and Geoffrey is anxious that I should go away to the sea for a little.  So that all things seem to point to my coming to Monkshaven.  Does your primitive little village boast a hotel?  Or, if not, can you engage some decent rooms for me?”