a strangled sound, almost like
the cry of some tortured thing. "Then things _have_ no meaning----"

Sara stood staring at him, bewildered and a little frightened.

"Garth, what is it?" she whispered. "What has happened?"

He turned, and, walking away from her a few paces, stood very still with
his head bent and one hand covering his eyes.

Overhead, the sunshine, filtering in through the green trellis of leafy
twigs, flaunted gay little dancing patches of gold on the path below,
as the leaves moved flickeringly in the breeze, and where the twisted
growth of a branch had left a leafless aperture, it flung a single shaft
of quivering light athwart the pergola. It gleamed like a shining sword
between the man and woman, as though dividing them one from the other
and thrusting each into the shadows that lay on either hand.

"Garth----"

At the sound of her voice he dropped his hand to his side and came
slowly back and stood beside her. His face was almost grey, and the
tortured expression of his eyes seemed to hurt her like the stab of a
knife.

"You must try to forgive me," he said, speaking very low and rapidly. "I
had no earthly right to tell you that I cared, because--because I can't
ask you to marry me. I told you once that I had forfeited my claim to
the good things in life. That was true. And, having that knowledge, I
ought to have kept away from you--for I knew how it was going to be
with me from the first moment I saw you. I fought against it in the
beginning--tried not to love you. Afterwards, I gave in, but I never
dreamed that--you--would come to care, too. That seemed something quite
beyond the bounds of human possibility."

"Did it? I can't see why it should?"

"Can't you?" He smiled a little. "If you were a man who has lived under
a cloud for over twenty years, who has nothing in the world to recommend
him, and only a tarnished reputation as his life-work, you, too, would
have thought it inconceivable. Anyway, I did, and, thinking that, I
dared to give myself the pleasure of seeing you--of being sometimes in
your company. Perhaps"--grimly--"it was as much a torture as a joy on
occasion. . . . But still, I was near you. . . . I could see you--touch
your hand--serve you, perhaps, in any little way that offered. That was
all something--something very wonderful to come into a life that, to
all intents and purposes, was over. And I thought I could keep myself in
hand--never let you know that I cared--"