“What are you driving at now?”

“I should think it’s plain enough!  Don’t you see what it would mean to Sara if—­that—­happened?  She’d never believe—­afterwards—­that I’m as black as I’m painted, and I should saddle her with an intolerable burden of self-reproach.  No, the Army is a closed door for me. . . .  Damn it, Herrick!” with the sudden nervous violence of a man goaded past endurance.  “Can’t you understand?  I ought never to have come into her life at all.  I’ve only messed things up for her—­damnably.  The least I can do is to clear out of it so that she’ll never regret my going. . . .  I’ve gone under, and a man who’s gone under had better stay there.”

Both men were silent—­Trent with the bitter, brooding silence of a man who has battered uselessly against the bars that hem him in, and who at last recognizes that they can never be forced asunder, Herrick trying to focus his vision to that of the man beside him.

“No”—­Garth spoke with a finality there was no disputing—­“I’ve been buried three-and-twenty years, and my resurrection hasn’t been exactly a success.  There’s no place in the world for me unless some one else pays the price.  It’s better for every one concerned that I should—­stay buried.”

CHAPTER XXXIII

OVER THE MOUNTAINS

“He didn’t do it!”

Suddenly, Sara found herself saying the words aloud in the darkness and solitude of the night.

Since her meeting with Garth, on her way to the hospital, every hour had been an hour of conflict.  That brief, strained interview had shaken her to the depths of her being, and, unable to sleep when night came, she had lain, staring wide-eyed into the dark, struggling against its influence.

Little enough had been said.  It had been the silences, the dumb, passion-filled silences, vibrant with all that must not be spoken, which had tried her endurance to the utmost, and she had fled, at last, incontinently, because she had felt her resolution weakening each moment she and Garth remained together—­because, with him beside her, the love against which she had been fighting for twelve long months had wakened into fierce life again, beating down her puny efforts to withstand it.

The mere sound of his voice, the lightest touch of his hand, had power to thrill her from head to foot, to rock those barriers which his own act had forced her to build up between them.

The recollection of that one perfect moment, when the serene austerity of his face had given the lie to that of which he was accused, lingered with her, a faint elusive thread of hope which would not leave her, urging, suggesting, combating the hard facts to which he himself had given ruthless confirmation.

Almost without her cognizance, Sara’s characteristic, vehement belief in whomsoever she loved—­stunned at the first moment of Elisabeth’s revelation—­had been gradually creeping back to feeble, halting life, weakened at times by the mass of evidence arrayed against it, yet still alive—­growing and strengthening secretly within her as an unborn babe grows and strengthens.