From her earliest days at Barrow she had always carried the small tangles of childhood to a remote corner of the pine-woods for solution, and the habit had grown with her growth, so that now, when a rather bigger tangle presented itself, she turned instinctively to the solitude of the cliffs at Monkshaven, where the murmur of the sea was borne in her ears, plaintively reminiscent of the sound of the wind in her beloved pine trees.

Spring comes early in the sheltered, southern bay of Monkshaven, and already the bracken was sending up pushful little shoots of young green, curled like a baby’s fist, while the primroses, bunched together in clusters, thrust peering faces impertinently above the green carpet of the woods.  Sara stopped to pick a handful, tucking them into her belt.  Then, emerging from the woods, she breasted the steep incline that led to the brow of the cliff.

A big boulder, half overgrown with moss and lichen, offered a tempting resting-place, and flinging herself down on the yielding turf beside it, she leaned back and drew out Elisabeth’s letter.

She had sometimes wondered whether Elisabeth had any suspicion of the fact that, before leaving Barrow, she had refused to marry Tim.  The friendship and understanding between mother and son was so deep that it was very possible that Tim had taken her into his confidence.  And even if he had not, the eyesight of love is extraordinarily keen, and Elisabeth would almost inevitably have divined that something was amiss with his happiness.

If this were so, as Sara admitted to herself with a wry smile, there was little doubt that she would look askance at the woman who had had the temerity to refuse her beautiful Tim!

And now, although her letter contained no definite allusion to the matter, reading between the lines, the conviction was borne in upon Sara that Elisabeth knew all that there was to know, and had ranged herself, heart and soul, on the side of her son.

It was obvious that she thought of the whole world in terms of Tim, and, had she been a different type of woman, the simile of a hen with one chick would have occurred to Sara’s mind.

But there was nothing in the least hen-like about Elisabeth Durward.  Only, whenever Tim came near her, her face, with its strangely inscrutable eyes, would irradiate with a sudden warmth and tenderness of emotion that was akin to the exquisite rapture of a lover when the beloved is near.  To Sara, there seemed something a little frightening—­almost terrible—­in her intense devotion to Tim.

The letter itself was charmingly written—­expressing the hope that Sara was happy and comfortable at Monkshaven, recalling their pleasant time at Barrow together, and looking forward to other future visits from her—­“which would be a fulfillment of happiness to us all.”

It was this last sentence, combined with one or two other phrases into which much or little meaning might equally as easily be read, which had aroused in Sara a certain uneasy instinct of apprehension.  Dimly she sensed a vague influence at work to strengthen the ties that bound her to Barrow, and to all that Barrow signified.