te,
and, thanks to a year in France when she was seventeen--a much-grudged
year, at the time, since it had separated her from her beloved
Patrick--and to a natural facility for the language, inherited from her
French forbears, she spoke French almost as fluently as she did English.

In France they were crying out for nurses, for at that period of the war
there was work for any woman who had even a little knowledge plus the
grit to face the horrors of those early days, and it was to France that
Sara forthwith determined to go.

She had heard that an old friend of Patrick Lovell's, Lady Arronby by
name, proposed equipping and taking over to France a party of nurses,
and she promptly wrote to her, begging that she might be included in the
little company.

Lady Arronby, who had been a sister at a London hospital before her
marriage, recollected her old friend's ward very clearly. Sara rarely
failed to make a definite impression, even upon people who only knew her
slightly, and Lady Arronby, who had known her from her earliest days at
Barrow, answered her letter without hesitation.

"I shall be delighted to have you with me," she had written. "Even
though you are not a trained nurse, there's work out there for women of
your caliber, my dear. So come. It will be a week or two yet before we
have all our equipment, but I am pushing things on as fast as I can, so
hold yourself in readiness to come at a day's notice."

Meanwhile, Sara's earliest personal encounter with the reality of the
war came in a few hurried lines from Elisabeth telling her that Major
Durward had rejoined the Army and would be going out to France almost
immediately.

Sara thrilled, and with the thrill came the answering stab of the sword
that was to pierce her again and again through the long months ahead.
Garth Trent--the man she loved--could have no part nor lot in this
splendid service of England's sons for England! The country wanted brave
men now--not men who faltered when faltering meant failure and defeat.

She had not seen Garth since that day--a million years ago it
seemed--when she had sent him from her, and he had gone, admitting the
justice of her decision.

There was no getting behind that. She would have defied Elisabeth,
defied a whole world of slanderous tongues, had they accused him, if he
himself had denied the charge. But he had not been able to deny it. It
was true--a deadly, official truth, tabulated somewhere in the records
of