Sara listened with undignified interest.  It was strange how the enigmatical personality of the owner of Far End kept cropping up across her path.

“And what is your own opinion, Mrs. Maynard?” she asked.

Audrey flashed her a keen glance from her rain-clear eyes.

“I think he’s a—­sphinx,” she said slowly.

“The Sphinx was a lady,” objected Herrick pertinently.

“Mr. Trent’s a masculine re-incarnation of her, then,” retorted Mrs. Maynard, undefeated.

Herrick smiled tolerantly.  He was a tall, slenderly built man, with whimsical brown eyes and the half-stern, half-sweet mouth of one who has been through the mill of physical pain.

“Homme incompris,” he suggested lightly.  “Give the fellow his due—­he at least supplies the feminine half of Monkshaven with a topic of perennial interest.”

Audrey took up the implied challenge with enthusiasm, and the two of them wrangled comfortably together till tea was over.  Then she demanded a cigarette—­and another cushion—­and finally sent Miles in search of some snapshots they had taken together and which he had developed since last they had met.  She treated him exactly as though he suffered no handicap, demanding from him all the little services she would have asked from a man who was physically perfect.

Sara herself, accustomed to anticipating every need of Patrick Lovell’s, would have been inclined to feel somewhat compunctious over allowing a lame man to wait upon her, yet, as she watched the eager way in which Miles responded to the visitor’s behests, she realized that in reality Audrey was behaving with supreme tact.  She let Miles feel himself a man as other men, not a mere “lame duck” to whom indulgence must needs be granted.

And once, when her hair just brushed his cheek, as he stooped over her to indicate some special point in one of the recently developed photos, Sara surprised a sudden ardent light in his quiet brown eyes that set her wondering whether possibly, the incessant sparring between Herrick and the lively, impulsive woman who shocked half Monkshaven, did not conceal something deeper than mere friendship.

CHAPTER VIII

THE UNWILLING HOST

It was one of those surprisingly warm days, holding a foretaste of June’s smiles, which March occasionally vouchsafes.

The sun blazed down out of a windless, cloudless sky, and Sara, making her way leisurely through the straggling woods that intervened betwixt the Selwyns’ house and Monk’s Cliff, felt the salt-laden air wafted against her face, as warmly mellow as though summer were already come.

Molly had gone to Oldhampton—­since the artists’ colony there would be certain to take advantage of this gift of a summer’s day to arrange a sketching party, and, as the morning’s post had brought Sara a letter from Elisabeth Durward which had occasioned her considerable turmoil of spirit, she had followed her natural bent by seeking the solitude of a lonely tramp in order to think the matter out.