apital letters, had been chalked up by some
one on the big wooden double-doors that shut the world out from Far End.

Sara stood quite still, gazing at them fixedly, and a tense white-heat
of anger flared up within her. Who had dared to put such an insult upon
the man she loved?

"_Coward_!" No one had ever actually applied that term to Garth in her
hearing. They had skirted delicately round it, or wrapped up its meaning
in some less harsh-sounding tangle of phrases, and although she had
bitterly used the word herself, now that the opprobrious expression
publicly confronted her, writ large by some unfriendly hand, she
was swept by a sheer fury of indignant denial. It roused in her the
immediate instinct to defend, to range herself unmistakably on Garth's
side against a world of traducers.

With a faint smile of self-mockery, she realized that had this flagrant
insult been leveled at him in the beginning, had her first knowledge of
the black shadow which hung over him been thus brutally flung at her,
instead of diffidently, reluctantly broken to her by Elisabeth, she
would probably, with the instinctive partisanship of woman for her mate,
have utterly refused to credit it--against all reason and all proof.

She wondered who could have done this ting, nailed this insult to
Garth's very door. The illiterate characters stamped it as the work of
some one in the lower walks of life, and, with a frown of annoyance,
Sara promptly--and quite correctly--ascribed it to Black Brady.

"I never forgits to pay back," he had told her once, belligerently.
Probably this was his notion of getting even with the man who had
prosecuted him for poaching. But had Brady realized that, in retaliating
upon Trent, he would be giving pain to his beloved Sara, whom he had
grown to regard with a humble, dog-like devotion, he would certainly
have refrained from recording his vengeance upon Garth's gateway.

Surmising that Garth could not have seen the offending legend--or it
would scarcely have been left for all who can to read--Sara whipped out
her handkerchief and set to work to rub it off. He should not see it if
she could help it!

But Black Brady had done his work very thoroughly, and she was still
diligently scrubbing at it with an inadequate piece of cambric when she
heard steps behind her, and wheeling round, found herself confronted by
Garth himself.

His eyes rested indifferently and without surprise upon the chalked-up
words, then