Throughout lunch Sara conversed mechanically, responding like an automaton when any one put a penny in the slot by asking her a question.  She felt utterly bewildered, stunned by Garth’s behaviour.

Had their meeting been exchanged under the observant eyes of the rest of the party, it would have been intelligible to her, for he was the last man in the world to wear his heart upon his sleeve.  But they had been quite alone for the moment, and yet he had permitted no acknowledgment of the new relations between them to appear either in word or look.  He had greeted her precisely as though they were no more to each other than the merest acquaintances—­as though the happenings of the previous day had been wiped out of his mind.  It was incomprehensible!

Sara felt almost as if some one had dealt her a physical blow, and it required all her pluck and poise to enable her to take her share of the general conversation before wending their several ways homeward.

“. . .  And we’ll picnic on Devil’s Hood Island.”

Audrey’s high, clear voice, as she chattered to Molly, characteristically propounding half-a-dozen plans for the immediate future, floated across to Sara where she stood waiting on the lowest step, impatient to be gone.  As though drawn by some invisible magnet, her eyes encountered Garth’s, and the swift colour rushed into her cheeks, staining them scarlet.

His expression was enigmatical.  The next moment he bent forward and spoke, in a low voice that reached her ear alone.

“Much maligned place—­where I tasted my one little bit of heaven!” Then, after a pause, he added deliberately:  “But a black sheep has no business with heaven.  He’d be turned away from the doors—­and quite rightly, too!  That’s why I shall never ask for admittance.”  He regarded her steadily for a moment, then quietly averted his eyes.

And Sara realized that in those few words he had revoked—­repudiating all that he had claimed, all that he had given, the day before.

CHAPTER XIII

DISILLUSION

“Letters are unsatisfactory things at the best of times, and what we all want is to have you with us again for a little while.  I am sure you must have had a surfeit of the simple life by this time, so come to us and be luxurious and exotic in London for a change.  Don’t disappoint us, Sara!

“Yours ever affectionately,

“ELISABETH.”

Sara, seated at the open window of her room, re-read the last paragraph of the letter which the morning’s post had brought her, and then let it fall again on to her lap, whilst she stared with sombre eyes across the bay to where the Monk’s Cliff reared itself, stark and menacing, against the sky.

April had slipped into May, and the blue waters of the Channel flickered with a myriad dancing points of light reflected from an unclouded sun.  The trees had clothed themselves anew in pale young green, and the whole atmosphere was redolent of spring—­spring as she reaches her maturity before she steps aside to let the summer in.