But Trent remained adamant.

“Why shouldn’t he stand his punishment like any other man?” he said.

“Well, if it’s true that his wife is ill, and that he has been out of work—­”

“Are you offering those facts as an excuse for dishonesty?” asked Trent drily.

Sara smiled.

“Yes, I believe I am,” she acknowledged.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Like nine-tenths of your sex, you are fiercely Tory in theory and a rank socialist in practice,” he grumbled.

“Well, I’m not sure that that isn’t a very good working basis to go on,” she retorted.

As they stood in the porch at Sunnyside, she made yet one more effort to smooth matters over for the evil-doer, but Trent’s face still showed unrelenting in the light that streamed out through the open doorway.

“Ask me something else,” he said.  “I would do anything to please you, Sara, except”—­with a sudden tense decision—­“except interfere with the course of justice.  Let every man pay the penalty for his own sin.”

“That’s a hard creed,” objected Sara.

“Hard?” He shrugged his shoulders.  “Perhaps it is.  But”—­grimly—­“it’s the only creed I believe in.  Good-night”—­he held out his hand abruptly.  “I’m sorry I can’t do as you ask about Jim Brady.”

Before Sara could reply, he was striding away down the path, and a minute later the darkness had hidden him from view.

CHAPTER XI

TWO ON AN ISLAND

Sara’s conviction that Garth Trent would not be easily turned from any decision that he might take had been confirmed very emphatically over the matter of Black Brady.

Notwithstanding the fact that the man’s story of his wife’s illness proved to be perfectly genuine, Trent persisted that he must take his punishment, and all that Sara could do by way of mitigation was to promise Brady that she would pay the amount of any fine which might be imposed.

Brady, however, was not optimistic.

“There’ll be no opshun of a fine, miss,” he told her.  “I’ve a-been up before the gen’lemen too many times”—­grinning.  “But if so be you’d give an eye to Bessie here, whiles I’m in quod, I’d take it very kind of you.”

His forecast summed up the situation with lamentable accuracy.  No option of a fine was given, and during the brief space that the prison doors closed upon him, Sara saw to the welfare of his invalid wife, thereby winning the undying devotion of Black Brady’s curiously composite soul.

When he again found himself at liberty, she induced the frankly unwilling proprietor of the Cliff Hotel—­the only hotel of any pretension to which Monkshaven could lay claim—­to take him into his employment as an odd-job man.  How she accomplished this feat it is impossible to say, but the fact remains that she did accomplish it, and perhaps Jane Crab delved to the root of the matter in the terse comment which the circumstances elicited from her:  “Miss Tennant has a way with her that ’ud make they stone sphinxes gallop round the desert if so be she’d a mind they should.”