“But, Sara, surely—­surely you can’t still have any thought of marrying Garth Trent?” There was a hint of something like terror in her voice.

“No,” Sara responded wearily.  “No, I shall never marry—­Garth Trent.”

“Then why won’t you—­why can’t you—­”

“Marry Tim?”—­quietly.  “Because, although I shall never marry Garth now, I haven’t stopped loving him.”

“Do you mean that you can still care for him—­now that you know what kind of man he is?”

“Oh!  Good Heavens, Elisabeth!”—­the irritation born of frayed nerves hardened Sara’s voice so that it was almost unrecognizable—­“you can’t turn love on and off as you would a tap!  I shall never marry anybody now.  Tim understands that, and—­you must understand it, too.”

There was no mistaking her passionate sincerity.  The truth—­that Sara would never, as long as she lived, put another in the place Garth Trent had held—­seemed borne in upon Elisabeth that moment.

With a strangled cry she sank back into her chair, and her eyes, fixed on Sara’s small, stern-set face, held a strange, beaten look.  As she sat there, her hands gripping the chair-arms, there was something about her whole attitude that suggested defeat.

“So it’s all been useless—­quite useless!” she muttered in a queer, whispering voice.

She was not looking at Sara now.  Her vision was turned inward, and she seemed to be utterly oblivious of the other’s presence.  “Useless!” she repeated, still in that strange, whispering tone.

“What has been useless?” asked Sara curiously.

Elisabeth started, and stared at her for a moment in a vacant fashion.  Then, all at once, her mind seemed to come back to the present, and simultaneously the familiar watchful look sprang into her eyes.  Sara was oddly conscious of being reminded of a sentry who has momentarily slept at his post, and then, awakening suddenly, feverishly resumed his vigilance.

“What was I saying?” Elisabeth brushed her hand distressfully across her forehead.

“You said that it had all been useless,” repeated Sara.  “What did you mean?”

Elisabeth paused a moment before replying.

“I meant that all my hopes were useless,” she explained at last.  “The hopes I had that some day you would be Tim’s wife.”

“Yes, they’re quite useless—­if that is what you meant,” replied Sara.  But there was a perplexed expression in her eyes.  She had a feeling that Elisabeth was not being quite frank with her—­that that whispered confession of failure signified something other than the simple interpretations vouchsafed.

The thing worried her a little, nagging at the back of her mind with the pertinacity common to any little unexplained incident that has caught one’s attention.  But, in the course of a few days, the manifold happenings of daily life drove it out of her thoughts, not to recur until many months had passed and other issues paved the way for its resurgence.