e afraid." She turned her head aside. "They--the ones who were
afraid--didn't look . . . as Garth looks."

Herrick made no comment. He put a question.

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I expect you think I'm a fool? I've nothing to go on--on
the contrary, I've Garth's own admission that--that he _was_ cashiered.
And yet----Oh! Miles, if he were only doing anything--now--it would be
easier to believe in him! But--he holds absolutely aloof. It's as though
he _were_ afraid--still."

"Have you ever thought"--Herrick spoke slowly, without looking at
her--"what this year of war must have meant to a man who has been
a soldier--and is one no longer?" His eyes came back to her face
meditatively.

"How--what do you mean?" she whispered.

"You've only got to look at the man to know what I mean. I think--since
the war broke out--that Trent has been through the bitterness of death."

"But--but he could have enlisted--got in somehow--under another name,
had he _wanted_ to fight. Or he might have gone out and driven an
ambulance car--as Lester Kent did."

Sara was putting to Herrick the very arguments which had arisen in
her own mind to confound the intuitive belief of which she had
been conscious since that moment of inward revelation on Crabtree
Moor--putting them forward in all their repulsive ugliness of fact, in
the desperate hope that Herrick might find some way to refute them.

"Some men might have done, perhaps," answered Miles quietly. "But not
a man of Trent's temperament. Some trees bend in a storm--and when the
worst of it is past, they spring erect again. Some _can't_; they break."

The words recalled to Sara's mind with sudden vividness the last letter
Patrick Lovell had ever written her--the one which he had left in the
Chippendale bureau for her to receive after his death. He had applied
almost those identical words to the Malincourt temperament, of which he
had recognized the share she had inherited. And she realized that her
guardian and Miles Herrick had been equally discerning. Though
differing in its effect upon each of them, consequent upon individual
idiosyncrasy, the fact remained that she and Garth were both "breaking"
beneath the strain which destiny had imposed on them.

With the memory of Patrick's letter came an inexpressible longing
for the man himself--for the kindly, helping hand which he would have
stretched out to her in this crisis of her life. She felt sure that, had
he been