Looking backward, how utterly insignificant seemed that petty disagreement now!  Had she but known the bitter separation that must come, she would have let no trifling difference, such as this had been, rob her of a single precious moment of their friendship.

She wondered if she and Garth would ever meet again.  She had been back in Monkshaven for some weeks now, but he had studiously avoided meeting her, shutting himself up within the solitude of Far End.

And then, with her thoughts still centred round the man she loved, she lifted her eyes and saw him standing quite close to her.  He was leaning against a gate which gave egress from the moor into an adjacent pasture field towards which her steps were bent.  His arms, loosely folded, rested upon the top of the gate, and he was looking away from her towards the distant vista of sea and cliff.  Evidently he had not heard her light footsteps on the springy turf, for he made no movement, but remained absorbed in his thoughts, unconscious of her presence.

Sara halted as though transfixed.  For an instant the whole world seemed to rock, and a black mist rose up in front of her, blotting out that solitary figure at the gateway.  Her heart beat in great, suffocating throbs, and her throat ached unbearably, as if a hand had closed upon it and were gripping it so tightly that she could not breathe.  Then her senses steadied, and her gaze leapt to the face outlined in profile against the cold background of the winter sky.

Her searching eyes, poignantly observant, sensed a subtle difference in it—­or, perhaps, less actually a difference than a certain emphasizing of what had been before only latent and foreshadowed.  The lean face was still leaner than she had known it, and there were deep lines about the mouth—­graven.  And the mouth itself held something sternly sweet and austere about the manner of its closing—­a severity of self-discipline which one might look to see on the lips of a man who has made the supreme sacrifice of his own will, bludgeoning his desires into submission in response to some finely conceived impulse.

The recognition of this, of the something fine and splendid that had stamped itself on Garth’s features, came to Sara in a sudden blazoning flash of recognition.  This was not—­could not be the face of a weak man or a coward!  And for one transcendent moment of glorious belief sheer happiness overwhelmed her.

But, in the same instant, the damning facts stormed up at her—­the verdict of the court-martial, the details Elisabeth had supplied, above all, Garth’s own inability to deny the charge—­and the light of momentary ecstasy flared and went out in darkness.

An inarticulate sound escaped her, forced from her lips by the pang of that sudden frustration of leaping hope, and, hearing it, Garth turned and saw her.

“Sara!” The name rushed from his lips, shaken with a tumult of emotion.  And then he was silent, staring at her across the little space that separated them, his hand gripping the topmost bar of the gate as though for actual physical support.