She faced the question with characteristic frankness.  Tim had his own place in her heart—­secure and unassailable.  But it was not the place in that sacred inner temple which is reserved for the one man, and she recognized this with a limpid clearness of perception rather uncommon in a girl of twenty.  She also recognized that it was within the bounds of possibility that the one man might never come to claim that place, and that, if she gave Tim the answer he so ardently desired, they would quite probably rub along together as well as most married folk—­better, perhaps, than a good many.  But she was very sure that she never intended to desecrate that inner temple by any lesser substitute for love.

Thus she reasoned, with the untried confidence of youth, which is so pathetically certain of itself and of its ultimate power to hold to its ideals, ignorant of the overpowering influences which may develop to push a man or woman this way or that, or of the pain that may turn clear, definite thought into a welter of blind anguish, when the soul in its agony snatches at any anodyne, true or false, which may seem to promise relief.

A little irritably she folded up Elisabeth’s letter.  It was disquieting in some ways—­she could not quite explain why—­and just now she felt averse to wrestling with disturbing ideas.  She only wanted to lie still, basking in the tranquil peace of the afternoon, and listen to the murmuring voice of the sea.

She closed her eyes indolently, and presently, lulled by the drowsy rhythm of the waves breaking at the foot of the cliff, she fell asleep.

She woke with a start.  An ominous drop of rain had splashed down on to her cheek, and she sat up, broad awake in an instant and shivering a little.  It had turned much colder, and a wind had risen which whispered round her of coming storm, while the blue sky of an hour ago was hidden by heavy, platinum-coloured clouds massing up from the south.

Another and another raindrop fell, and, obeying their warning, Sara sprang up and bent her steps in the direction of home.  But she was too late to avoid the storm which had been brewing, and before she had gone a hundred yards it had begun to break in drifting scurries of rain, driven before the wind.

She hurried on, hoping to gain the shelter of the woods before the threatened deluge, but within ten minutes of the first heralding drops it was upon her—­a torrent of blinding rain, sweeping across the upland like a wet sheet.

She looked about her desperately, in search of cover, and perceiving, on the further side of a low stone wall, what she took to be a wooden shelter for cattle, she quickened her steps to a run, and, nimbly vaulting the wall, fled headlong into it.

It was not, however, the cattle shed she had supposed it, but a roughly constructed summer-house, open on one side to the four winds of heaven and with a wooden seat running round the remaining three.