“And—­the other man?  Have you met him yet—­at Monkshaven?”

There was no mistaking his meaning.  Sara’s eyes met his unflinchingly.

“If you mean has any one asked me to marry him—­no, Tim.  No one has done me that honour,” she answered lightly.

“Thank God!” he muttered below his breath.

Sara looked troubled.

“Haven’t you—­got over that, yet?” she said, hesitatingly.  “I—­I hoped you would, Tim.”

“I shall never get over it,” he asserted doggedly.  “And I shall never give you up till you are another man’s wife.”

The quiet intensity of his tones sounded strangely in her ears.  This was a new Tim, not the boyish Tim of former times, but a man with all a man’s steadfast purpose and determination.

She was spared the necessity of reply by the fact that they had reached their journey’s end.  The car slid smoothly to a standstill, and almost simultaneously the house-door opened, and behind the immaculate figure of the Durwards’ butler Sara descried the welcoming faces of Geoffrey and Elisabeth.

It was good to see them both again—­Geoffrey, big and debonair as ever, his jolly blue eyes beaming at her delightedly, and Elisabeth, still with that same elusive atmosphere of charm which always seemed to cling about her like the fragrance of a flower.

They were eager to hear Sara’s news, plying her with questions, so that before the end of her first evening with them they had gleaned a fairly accurate description of her life at Sunnyside and of the new circle of friends she had acquired.

But there was one name she refrained from mentioning—­that of Garth Trent, and none of Elisabeth’s quietly uttered comments or inquiries sufficed to break through the guard of her reticence concerning the Hermit of Far End.

“It sounds rather a manless Eden—­except for the nice, lame Herrick person,” said Elisabeth at last, and her hyacinth eyes, with their curiously veiled expression, rested consideringly on Sara’s face, alight with interest as she had vividly sketched the picture of her life at Monkshaven.

“Yes, I suppose it is rather,” she admitted.  Her tone was carelessly indifferent, but the eager light died suddenly out of her face, and Elisabeth, smiling faintly, adroitly turned the conversation.

Sara speedily discovered that she would have even less time for the fruitless occupation of remembering than she had anticipated.  The Durwards owned a host of friends in town with whom they were immensely popular, and Sara found herself caught up in a perpetual whirl of entertainment that left her but little leisure for brooding over the past.

She felt sometimes as though the London season had opened and swallowed her up, as the whale swallowed Jonah, and when she declared herself breathless with so much rushing about, Tim would coolly throw over any engagement that chanced to have been made and carry her off for a day up the river, where a quiet little lunch, in the tranquil shade of overhanging trees, and the cosy, intimate talk that was its invariable concomitant, seemed like an oasis of familiar, homely pleasantness in the midst of the gay turmoil of London in May.