ion of
Monkshaven. Go in to him, will you? I must run off--I've got a million
things to see to. You're not looking very fit to-day"--suddenly
observing the other's white face and shadowed eyes. "Are you feeling up
to work?"

Sara nodded indifferently.

"Quite," she said. "I shouldn't have come otherwise."

Miles welcomed her joyfully.

"Bless you, my dear!" he exclaimed. "You're the very woman I wanted
to see. I'm snowed under with fool letters from females anxious to
entertain 'our poor, brave, wounded officers.' Head 'em off, will you?"
He thrust a bundle of letters into her hands. Then, as she moved toward
the windows, and the cold, searching light of the wintry sunshine fell
full on her face, his voice altered. "What is it? What has happened,
Sara?" he asked quickly.

She looked at him dumbly. Her lips moved, but no sound came. The sudden
question, accompanied by the swift, penetrating glance of Miles's brown
eyes, had taken her off her guard.

He limped across to her.

"Not a stroke of work for you to-day," he said decisively, taking the
bundle of letters out of her hands. "Now tell me what's wrong?"

She looked away from him, a slow, shamed red creeping into her face. At
last--

"I've seen Garth," she said very low.

Herrick nodded. He knew what that meeting had meant to one of these two
friends of his. Now he was to see the reverse of the medal. He waited,
his silence sympathetic and far more helpful than any eager, probing
question, however well-intentioned.

"Miles," she burst out suddenly, "I'm--I'm wretched!"

"How's that?" He did not make the mistake of attributing her outburst to
a transient mood of depression. Something deeper lay behind it.

"Since I saw Garth yesterday I've been asking myself whether--whether
I've been doing him a ghastly injustice"--she moistened her dry
lips--"whether he was really guilty of--running away."

"Ah!" Miles stuffed his hands in his pockets and limped the length
of the room and back. In that moment, he realized something of the
maddening, galling restraint of the bondage under which Garth Trent had
lived for years--the bondage of silence, and, within his pickets, his
hands were clenched when he halted again at Sara's side.

"Why?" he shot at her.

She hesitated. Then she caught her breath a little hysterically.

"Why--because--because I just can't believe it! . . . I've seen a lot
since I went away. I've seen brave men--and I've seen men . . . who
wer