Nor was the attitude he had assumed in regard to the war calculated to placate her.  She had learned from Molly that he had abstained from taking up any form of war-work whatsoever.  He appeared to be utterly indifferent to the need of the moment, and the whole of Monkshaven buzzed with patriotic disapprobation of his conduct.  There were few idle hands there now.  A big munitions factory had been established at Oldhampton, and its demands, added to the necessities of the hospital, left no loophole of excuse for slackers.

Sara reflected bitterly that the sole courage of which Garth seemed possessed was a kind of cold, moral courage—­brazen-facedness, the townspeople termed it—­which enabled him to refuse doggedly to be driven out of Monkshaven, even though the whole weight of public opinion was dead against him.

And then the recollection of that day on Devil’s Hood Island, when he had deliberately risked his life to save her reputation, would return to her with overwhelming force—­mocking the verdict of the court-martial, repudiating the condemnation which had made her thrust him out of her life.

So the pendulum swung, this way and that, lacerating her heart each time it swept forward or back.  But the blind agony of her recoil, when she had first learned the story of that tragic happening on the Indian frontier, was passed.

Then, overmastered by the horror of the thing, she had flung violently away from Garth, feeling herself soiled and dishonoured by the mere fact of her love for him, too revolted to contemplate anything other than the severance of the tie between them as swiftly as possible.

Now, with the widened sympathies and understanding which the past year of intimacy with human nature at its strongest, and at its weakest, had brought her, new thoughts and new possibilities were awaking within her.

The furnace—­that fiercely burning furnace of life at its intensest—­had done its work.

CHAPTER XXXII

ON CRABTREE MOOR

“Tim is wounded, and has been recommended for the Military Cross.”

Sara made the double announcement quite calmly.  The two things so often went together—­it was the grey and gold warp and waft of war with which people had long since grown pathetically familiar.

“How splendid!” Molly enthused with sparkling eyes, adding quickly, “I hope he’s not very badly wounded?”

“Elisabeth doesn’t give any particulars in her letter.  I can’t understand her,” Sara continued, her brows contracting in a puzzled fashion.  “She seems so calm about it.  She has always hated the idea of Tim’s soldiering, yet now, although she’s lost her husband and her son is wounded, she’s taking it finely.”

Selwyn looked up from filling his pipe.

“She’s answering to the call—­like every one else,” he observed quietly.

“No.”  Sara shook her head.  “I don’t feel as though it were that.  It’s something more individual.  Perhaps”—­thoughtfully—­“it’s pride of a kind.  The sort of impression I have is that she’s so proud—­so proud of Geoffrey’s fine death, and of Tim’s winning the Military Cross, that it has compensated in some way.”