“How—­what do you mean?” she whispered.

“You’ve only got to look at the man to know what I mean.  I think—­since the war broke out—­that Trent has been through the bitterness of death.”

“But—­but he could have enlisted—­got in somehow—­under another name, had he wanted to fight.  Or he might have gone out and driven an ambulance car—­as Lester Kent did.”

Sara was putting to Herrick the very arguments which had arisen in her own mind to confound the intuitive belief of which she had been conscious since that moment of inward revelation on Crabtree Moor—­putting them forward in all their repulsive ugliness of fact, in the desperate hope that Herrick might find some way to refute them.

“Some men might have done, perhaps,” answered Miles quietly.  “But not a man of Trent’s temperament.  Some trees bend in a storm—­and when the worst of it is past, they spring erect again.  Some can’t; they break.”

The words recalled to Sara’s mind with sudden vividness the last letter Patrick Lovell had ever written her—­the one which he had left in the Chippendale bureau for her to receive after his death.  He had applied almost those identical words to the Malincourt temperament, of which he had recognized the share she had inherited.  And she realized that her guardian and Miles Herrick had been equally discerning.  Though differing in its effect upon each of them, consequent upon individual idiosyncrasy, the fact remained that she and Garth were both “breaking” beneath the strain which destiny had imposed on them.

With the memory of Patrick’s letter came an inexpressible longing for the man himself—­for the kindly, helping hand which he would have stretched out to her in this crisis of her life.  She felt sure that, had he been beside her now, his shrewd counsel would have cleared away the mists of doubt and indecision which had closed about her.

But since he was no longer there to be appealed to, she had turned instinctively to Herrick, and, somehow, he had failed her.  He had not given her a definite expression of his own belief.  She had been humanly craving to hear that he, too, believed in Garth, notwithstanding the evidence against him—­that he had some explanation to offer of that ghastly tragedy of the court-martial episode.  And instead, he had only hazarded some tolerant suggestions—­sympathetic to Garth, it is true, but not carrying with them the vital, unqualified assurance she had longed to hear.

In spite of this, she knew that Herrick’s friendship with Garth had remained unbroken by the knowledge of the Indian Frontier story.  The personal relations of the two men were unchanged, and she felt as though Miles were withholding something from her, observing a reticence for which she could find no explanation.  He had been very kind and understanding—­it would not have been Miles had he been otherwise—­but he had not helped her much.  In some curious way she felt as though he had thrown the whole onus of coming to a decision, unaided by advice, upon her shoulders.