Sara frowned a little, but, recognizing the impossibility of probing into the matter at the moment, she dismissed it from her mind, resolving to elucidate the mystery later on.

Meanwhile, it was impossible to do other than acknowledge the results obtained.  Molly looked more like a stately young empress than an impecunious doctor’s daughter as she floated into the room, to be embraced and complimented by the Lavender Lady and to receive a generous meed of admiration, seasoned with a little gentle banter, from Miles Herrick.

Sara experienced a sensation of relief on discovering Miss Lavinia and Herrick to be the only occupants of the room.  Garth Trent had not yet come.  Despite her longing to see him again, she was conscious of a certain diffidence, a reluctance at meeting him in the presence of others, and she wished fervently that their first meeting after the events of the previous day could have taken place anywhere rather than at this gay little lunch party of Audrey’s.

As it fell out, however, she chanced to be entirely alone in the room when Trent was at length ushered in by a trim maidservant, the rest of the party having gradually drifted out on to the verandah, while she had lingered behind, glad of a moment’s solitude in which to try and steady herself.

She had never conceived it possible that so commonplace an emotion as mere nervousness could find place beside the immensities of love itself, yet, during the interminable moment when Garth crossed the room to her side, she was supremely aware of an absurd desire to turn and flee, and it was only by a sheer effort of will that she held her ground.

The next moment he had shaken hands with her and was making some tranquil observation upon the lateness of his arrival.  His manner was quite detached, every vestige of anything beyond mere conventional politeness banished from it.

The coolly neutral inflections of his voice struck upon Sara’s keyed-up consciousness as an indifferent finger may twang the stretched strings of a violin, producing a shuddering violation of their harmony.

She hardly knew how she answered him.  She only knew, with a sudden overwhelming certainty, that the Garth who stood beside her now was a different man, altered out of all kinship with the man who had held her in his arms on Devil’s Hood Island.  The lover was gone; only the acquaintance remained.

She stammered a few halting words by way of response, and—­was she mistaken, or did a sudden look of understanding, almost, it seemed, of compunction, leap for a moment into his eyes, only to be replaced by the brooding, bitter indifference habitual to them?

The opportune return of Audrey and her other guests, heralded by a gust of cheerful laughter, tided over the difficult moment, and Garth turned away to make his apologies to his hostess, blaming some slight mishap to his car for the tardiness of his appearance.