HOST

It was one of those surprisingly warm days, holding a foretaste of
June's smiles, which March occasionally vouchsafes.

The sun blazed down out of a windless, cloudless sky, and Sara, making
her way leisurely through the straggling woods that intervened betwixt
the Selwyns' house and Monk's Cliff, felt the salt-laden air wafted
against her face, as warmly mellow as though summer were already come.

Molly had gone to Oldhampton--since the artists' colony there would be
certain to take advantage of this gift of a summer's day to arrange a
sketching party, and, as the morning's post had brought Sara a letter
from Elisabeth Durward which had occasioned her considerable turmoil of
spirit, she had followed her natural bent by seeking the solitude of a
lonely tramp in order to think the matter out.

From her earliest days at Barrow she had always carried the small
tangles of childhood to a remote corner of the pine-woods for solution,
and the habit had grown with her growth, so that now, when a rather
bigger tangle presented itself, she turned instinctively to the solitude
of the cliffs at Monkshaven, where the murmur of the sea was borne
in her ears, plaintively reminiscent of the sound of the wind in her
beloved pine trees.

Spring comes early in the sheltered, southern bay of Monkshaven, and
already the bracken was sending up pushful little shoots of young green,
curled like a baby's fist, while the primroses, bunched together in
clusters, thrust peering faces impertinently above the green carpet of
the woods. Sara stopped to pick a handful, tucking them into her belt.
Then, emerging from the woods, she breasted the steep incline that led
to the brow of the cliff.

A big boulder, half overgrown with moss and lichen, offered a tempting
resting-place, and flinging herself down on the yielding turf beside it,
she leaned back and drew out Elisabeth's letter.

She had sometimes wondered whether Elisabeth had any suspicion of the
fact that, before leaving Barrow, she had refused to marry Tim. The
friendship and understanding between mother and son was so deep that it
was very possible that Tim had taken her into his confidence. And
even if he had not, the eyesight of love is extraordinarily keen, and
Elisabeth would almost inevitably have divined that something was amiss
with his happiness.

If this were so, as Sara admitted to herself with a wry smile, there was
little doubt that she would look askance at the woma