“Bless you, my dear!” he exclaimed.  “You’re the very woman I wanted to see.  I’m snowed under with fool letters from females anxious to entertain ‘our poor, brave, wounded officers.’  Head ’em off, will you?” He thrust a bundle of letters into her hands.  Then, as she moved toward the windows, and the cold, searching light of the wintry sunshine fell full on her face, his voice altered.  “What is it?  What has happened, Sara?” he asked quickly.

She looked at him dumbly.  Her lips moved, but no sound came.  The sudden question, accompanied by the swift, penetrating glance of Miles’s brown eyes, had taken her off her guard.

He limped across to her.

“Not a stroke of work for you to-day,” he said decisively, taking the bundle of letters out of her hands.  “Now tell me what’s wrong?”

She looked away from him, a slow, shamed red creeping into her face.  At last—­

“I’ve seen Garth,” she said very low.

Herrick nodded.  He knew what that meeting had meant to one of these two friends of his.  Now he was to see the reverse of the medal.  He waited, his silence sympathetic and far more helpful than any eager, probing question, however well-intentioned.

“Miles,” she burst out suddenly, “I’m—­I’m wretched!”

“How’s that?” He did not make the mistake of attributing her outburst to a transient mood of depression.  Something deeper lay behind it.

“Since I saw Garth yesterday I’ve been asking myself whether—­whether I’ve been doing him a ghastly injustice”—­she moistened her dry lips—­“whether he was really guilty of—­running away.”

“Ah!” Miles stuffed his hands in his pockets and limped the length of the room and back.  In that moment, he realized something of the maddening, galling restraint of the bondage under which Garth Trent had lived for years—­the bondage of silence, and, within his pickets, his hands were clenched when he halted again at Sara’s side.

“Why?” he shot at her.

She hesitated.  Then she caught her breath a little hysterically.

“Why—­because—­because I just can’t believe it! . . .  I’ve seen a lot since I went away.  I’ve seen brave men—­and I’ve seen men . . . who were afraid.”  She turned her head aside.  “They—­the ones who were afraid—­didn’t look . . . as Garth looks.”

Herrick made no comment.  He put a question.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.  I expect you think I’m a fool?  I’ve nothing to go on—­on the contrary, I’ve Garth’s own admission that—­that he was cashiered.  And yet——­Oh!  Miles, if he were only doing anything—­now—­it would be easier to believe in him!  But—­he holds absolutely aloof.  It’s as though he were afraid—­still.”

“Have you ever thought”—­Herrick spoke slowly, without looking at her—­“what this year of war must have meant to a man who has been a soldier—­and is one no longer?” His eyes came back to her face meditatively.