“She is,” interpolated Molly affectionately.  “Aren’t you, dear Lavender Lady?”

Miss Lavinia smiled a trifle wistfully.

“Ah!  My dear,” she said sadly, “splendid things are done at such a cost, and when they are over we are apt to forget the splendour and remember only the heavy price. . . .  My poor Miles was horribly injured—­he had been dragged for yards, clinging to the horses’ bridles—­and for weeks we were not even sure if he would live.  He has lived—­but he will walk lame to the end of his life.”

The little instinctive silence which followed was broken by the sound of voices in the hall outside, and, a minute later, Miles Herrick himself came into the room, escorting a very fashionably attired and distinctly attractive woman, whom Sara guessed at once to be Audrey Maynard.

She was not in the least pretty, but the narrowest of narrow skirts in vogue in the spring of 1914 made no secret of the fact that her figure was almost perfect.  Her face was small and thin and inclined to be sallow, and beneath upward-slanting brows, to which art had undoubtedly added something, glimmered a pair of greenish-grey eyes, clear like rain.  Nor was there any mistaking the fact that the rich copper-colour of the hair swathed beneath the smart little hat had come out of a bottle, and was in no way to be accredited to nature.  It was small wonder that primitive Monkshaven stood aghast at such flagrant tampering with the obvious intentions of Providence.

But notwithstanding her up-to-date air of artificiality, there was something immensely likeable about Audrey Maynard.  Behind it all, Sara sensed the real woman—­clever, tactful, and generously warm-hearted.

Woman, when all is said and done, is frankly primitive in her instincts, and the desire to attract—­with all its odd manifestations—­is really but the outcome of her innate desire for home and a mate.  It is this which lies at the root of most of her little vanities and weaknesses—­and of all the big sacrifices of which she is capable as well.  So she may be forgiven the former, and trusted to fall short but rarely of the latter when the crucial test comes.

“Miles and I have been—­as usual—­squabbling violently,” announced Mrs. Maynard.  “Sugar, please—­lots of it,” she added, as Herrick handed her her tea.  “It was about the man who lives at Far End,” she continued in reply to the Lavender Lady’s smiling query.  “Miles has been very irritating, and tried to smash all my suggested theories to bits.  He insists that the Hermit is quite a commonplace, harmless young man—­”

“He must be at least forty,” interposed Herrick mildly.

Audrey frowned him into silence and continued—­

“Now that’s so dull, when half Monkshaven believes him to be a villain of the deepest dye, hiding from justice—­or, possibly, a Bluebeard with an unhappy wife imprisoned somewhere in that weird old house of his.”