And since that moment on the moor, when her eyes had searched Garth’s face—­his face with the mask off—­the dormant belief within her had sprung into conscious knowledge.

Throughout the long hours of the night she had fought against it, deeming it but the passionate outcome of her love for the man himself.  She wanted to believe him innocent; it was only her love for him which had raised this phantom doubt of the charges brought against him; the wish had been father to the thought.  So she told herself, struggling conscientiously against that to which she longed to yield.

And then, making a mockery of the hateful thing of which he had been accused, her individual knowledge of Garth himself rose up and confronted her accusingly.

Nothing that she had ever known of him had pointed to any lack of courage.  It had been on no sudden, splendid impulse of a moment that he had plunged into the sea and fought that treacherous, racing tide off Devil’s Hood Island.  Quite composedly, deliberately, he had calculated the risks—­and taken them!

Once more, she recalled the vision of his face as she had seen it yesterday, in that instant before he had perceived her nearness to him—­strong and steadfast, imprinted with a disciplined nobility—­and the repudiation of his dishonour leapt spontaneously from her lips.

“He didn’t do it!”

She had spoken involuntarily, the thought rushing into words before she was aware, and the sound of her own voice in the darkness startled her.  It seemed almost like a voice from some Otherwhere, authoritatively assuring her of all she had ached to believe.

She lay back on her pillows, smiling a little at the illusion.  But the sense of peace, of blessed assuredness, remained with her.  She had struggled through the darkness of those bitter months of unbelief, and now she had come out into the light on the other side.  She felt dreamily contented and at rest, and presently she fell asleep, trustfully, as a little child may sleep, the smile still on her lips.

With morning came reaction—­blank, sordid reaction, depressing her unutterably.

Amid the score of trifling details incidental to the day’s arrangements, with the usual uninspiring conversation prevalent at the breakfast-table going on around her, the mood of the previous night, informed, as it had been, with that triumphant sense of exaltation, slipped from her like a garment.

Supposing she were to tell them—­to tell Selwyn and Molly—­that, without any further evidence, she was convinced of Garth’s innocence?  Why, they would think she had gone mad!  Regretfully, with infinite pain it might be, but still none the less conclusively, they had accepted the fact of his guilt.  And indeed, what else could be expected of them, seeing that he had himself acknowledged it?

And yet—­that inner feeling of belief which had stirred into new life refused to be repressed.