No man is all angel—­or all devil.  Supposing Garth had been guilty of cowardice, had had his one moment of weakness?  She no longer cared!  He was hers, her lover, alike in his weakness and in his strength.  She had known men in France shrink in terror at the evil droning of a shell, and then die selflessly that others might live.

“Your faith must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way—­or to go over them,” Patrick had written.

And Sara, hiding her face in her hands, thanked God that now, at last, her faith was big enough, and that love—­“the one altogether good and perfect gift”—­was still hers if she would only go over the mountains.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE

“GARTH TRENT, COWARD.”

The words, in staring white capital letters, had been chalked up by some one on the big wooden double-doors that shut the world out from Far End.

Sara stood quite still, gazing at them fixedly, and a tense white-heat of anger flared up within her.  Who had dared to put such an insult upon the man she loved?

“Coward!” No one had ever actually applied that term to Garth in her hearing.  They had skirted delicately round it, or wrapped up its meaning in some less harsh-sounding tangle of phrases, and although she had bitterly used the word herself, now that the opprobrious expression publicly confronted her, writ large by some unfriendly hand, she was swept by a sheer fury of indignant denial.  It roused in her the immediate instinct to defend, to range herself unmistakably on Garth’s side against a world of traducers.

With a faint smile of self-mockery, she realized that had this flagrant insult been leveled at him in the beginning, had her first knowledge of the black shadow which hung over him been thus brutally flung at her, instead of diffidently, reluctantly broken to her by Elisabeth, she would probably, with the instinctive partisanship of woman for her mate, have utterly refused to credit it—­against all reason and all proof.

She wondered who could have done this ting, nailed this insult to Garth’s very door.  The illiterate characters stamped it as the work of some one in the lower walks of life, and, with a frown of annoyance, Sara promptly—­and quite correctly—­ascribed it to Black Brady.

“I never forgits to pay back,” he had told her once, belligerently.  Probably this was his notion of getting even with the man who had prosecuted him for poaching.  But had Brady realized that, in retaliating upon Trent, he would be giving pain to his beloved Sara, whom he had grown to regard with a humble, dog-like devotion, he would certainly have refrained from recording his vengeance upon Garth’s gateway.

Surmising that Garth could not have seen the offending legend—­or it would scarcely have been left for all who can to read—­Sara whipped out her handkerchief and set to work to rub it off.  He should not see it if she could help it!