ess that for
a time she had been hardly conscious of pain, but only of a fierce,
intolerable resentment and of a pride--that "devil's own pride" which
Patrick had told her was the Tennant heritage--which had been wounded to
the quick.

Garth had taken that pride of hers and ground it under his heel. He
had played at love, and she had been fool enough to mistake love's
simulacrum for the real thing. Or, if there had been any genuine spark
of love kindling the fire of passion that had blazed about her for one
brief moment, then he had since chosen deliberately to disavow it.

He had indicated his intention unmistakably. Since the day of the
luncheon party at Greenacres he had shunned meeting her whenever
possible, and, on the one or two occasions when an encounter had been
unavoidable, his manner had been frigidly indifferent and impersonal.

Outwardly she had repaid him in full measure--indifference for
indifference, ice for ice, gallantly matching her woman's pride against
his deliberate apathy, but inwardly she writhed at the remembrance
of that day on the island, when, in the stress of her terror for his
safety, she had let him see into the very heart of her.

Well, it was over now, and done with. The brief vision of love which had
given a new, transcendent significance to the whole of life, had faded
swiftly into bleak darkness, its memory marred by that bitterest of all
knowledge to a woman--the knowledge that she had been willing to give
her love, to make the great surrender, and that it had not been required
of her. All that remained was to draw a veil as decently as might be
over the forgettable humiliation.

The strain of the last fortnight had left its mark on her. The angles of
her face seemed to have become more sharply defined, and her eyes were
too brilliant and held a look of restlessness. But her lips closed as
firmly as ever, a courageous scarlet line, denying the power of fate to
thrust her under.

The Book of Garth--the book of love--was closed, but there were many
other volumes in life's library, and Sara did not propose to go through
the probable remaining fifty or sixty years of her existence uselessly
bewailing a dead past. She would face life, gamely, whatever it might
bring, and as she had already sustained one of the hardest blows ever
likely to befall her, she would probably make a success of it.

But, unquestionably, she would be glad to get away from Monkshaven for
a time, to have lei