Miles saluted.

“Quartermaster, at your service, miss,” he said cheerfully, adding with a chuckle:  “I saw my chance of getting a job if I married Audrey, so of course I took it.”

He was looking amazingly well.  The fact of being of some use in the world had acted upon him like a tonic, and there was no misinterpreting the glance of complete and happy understanding that passed between him and his wife.

Glad as she was to see it, it served to remind Sara painfully of all that she had missed, to stir anew the aching longing for Garth Trent, which, though struggled against, and beaten down, and sometimes temporarily crowded out by the thousand claims of each day’s labour, had been with her all through the long months of her absence from Monkshaven.

It was this which had worn her so fine, not the hard physical work that she had been doing.  Always slender, and built on racing lines, there was something almost ethereal about her now, and her sombre eyes looked nearly double their size in her small face of which the contour was so painfully distinct.  Yet she was as vivid and alive as ever; she seemed to diffuse, as it were, a kind of spiritual brilliance.

“She makes one think of a flame,” Audrey told her husband when they were alone once more.  “There is something so vital about her, in spite of that curiously frail look she has.”

Miles nodded.

“She’s burning herself out,” he said briefly.

Audrey looked startled.

“What do you mean, Miles?”

“Good Heavens!  I should think it’s self-evident.  She’s exactly as much in love with Trent as she was a year ago, and she’s fighting against it every hour of her life.  And the strain’s breaking her.”

“Can’t we do something to help?” Audrey put her question with a helpless consciousness of its futility.

Herrick’s eyes kindled.

“Nothing,” he answered with quiet decision.  “Every one must work out his own salvation—­if it’s to be a salvation worth having.”

Herrick had delved to the root of the matter when he had declared that
Sara was exactly as much in love as she had been a year ago.

She had realized this for herself, and it had converted life into an endless conflict between her love for Garth and her shamed sense of his unworthiness.  And now, her return to Monkshaven, to its familiar, memory-haunted scenes, had quickened the struggle into new vitality.

With the broadened outlook born of her recent experiences, she began to ask herself whether a man need be condemned, utterly and for ever, for a momentary loss of nerve—­even Elisabeth had admitted that it was probably no more than that!  And then, conversely, her fierce detestation of that particular form of weakness, inculcated in her from her childhood by Patrick Lovell, would spring up protestingly, and she would shrink with loathing from the thought that she had given her love to a man who had been convicted of that very thing.