She had been through a course of First Aid and held her certificate, and, thanks to a year in France when she was seventeen—­a much-grudged year, at the time, since it had separated her from her beloved Patrick—­and to a natural facility for the language, inherited from her French forbears, she spoke French almost as fluently as she did English.

In France they were crying out for nurses, for at that period of the war there was work for any woman who had even a little knowledge plus the grit to face the horrors of those early days, and it was to France that Sara forthwith determined to go.

She had heard that an old friend of Patrick Lovell’s, Lady Arronby by name, proposed equipping and taking over to France a party of nurses, and she promptly wrote to her, begging that she might be included in the little company.

Lady Arronby, who had been a sister at a London hospital before her marriage, recollected her old friend’s ward very clearly.  Sara rarely failed to make a definite impression, even upon people who only knew her slightly, and Lady Arronby, who had known her from her earliest days at Barrow, answered her letter without hesitation.

“I shall be delighted to have you with me,” she had written.  “Even though you are not a trained nurse, there’s work out there for women of your caliber, my dear.  So come.  It will be a week or two yet before we have all our equipment, but I am pushing things on as fast as I can, so hold yourself in readiness to come at a day’s notice.”

Meanwhile, Sara’s earliest personal encounter with the reality of the war came in a few hurried lines from Elisabeth telling her that Major Durward had rejoined the Army and would be going out to France almost immediately.

Sara thrilled, and with the thrill came the answering stab of the sword that was to pierce her again and again through the long months ahead.  Garth Trent—­the man she loved—­could have no part nor lot in this splendid service of England’s sons for England!  The country wanted brave men now—­not men who faltered when faltering meant failure and defeat.

She had not seen Garth since that day—­a million years ago it seemed—­when she had sent him from her, and he had gone, admitting the justice of her decision.

There was no getting behind that.  She would have defied Elisabeth, defied a whole world of slanderous tongues, had they accused him, if he himself had denied the charge.  But he had not been able to deny it.  It was true—­a deadly, official truth, tabulated somewhere in the records of her country, that the man she loved had been cashiered for cowardice.

The knowledge almost crushed her, and she sometimes wondered if there could be a keener suffering, in the whole gamut of human pain, than that which a woman bears whose high pride in her lover has been laid utterly in the dust.

The dread of danger, separation—­even death itself—­were not comparable with it.  Sara envied the women whose men were killed in action.  At least, they had a splendid memory to hold which nothing could ever soil or take away.