“No, in that, at least, I was honest with you.”  The bitter note of mockery that had rung through all his former speech was suddenly absent—­muted, crushed out, and the quiet, steadfast utterance carried conviction even in Sara’s reeling faith, shaking her to the very soul.

“But . . .  Elisabeth? . . .  You loved her once.  And love—­can’t die, Garth.”

“No,” he said gravely.  “Love can’t die.  But what I felt for Elisabeth was not love—­not love as you and I understand it.  It was the mad passion of a boy for an extraordinarily beautiful woman.  She was an ideal—­I invested her with all the qualities and spiritual graces that her beauty seemed to promise.  But the Elisabeth I loved—­didn’t exist.”  He drew nearer her and, laying his hands on her shoulders, looked down at her with eyes that seemed to burn their way into the inmost depths of her being.  “Whatever you may think of me, however low I may have fallen in your sight, believe me in this—­that I have loved you and shall always love you, utterly and entirely, with my whole soul and body.  It has not been an easy love—­I fought against it with all my strength, knowing that it could only carry pain and suffering in its train for both of us.  But it conquered me.  And when you came to me that day, so courageously, holding out your hands, claiming the love that was unalterably yours—­when you came to me like that, a little hurt and wounded because I had been so slow to speak my love—­I yielded!  Before God, Sara!  I had been either more or less than a man had I resisted!”

The grip of his hands upon her shoulders tightened until it was actual pain, and she winced under it, shrinking away from him.  He released her instantly, and she stood silently beside him, battling against the longing to respond to that deep, abiding love which neither now, nor ever again in life, would she be able to doubt.

That Garth loved her, wholly and completely, was an incontrovertible fact.  She no longer felt the least lingering mistrust, nor even any prick of jealousy that he had once loved before.  That boyish passion of the senses for Elisabeth was not comparable with this love which was the maturer growth of his manhood—­a love that could only know fulfillment in the mystic union of body, soul, and spirit.

But this merely served to deepen the poignancy of the impending parting—­for that she and Garth must part she recognized as inevitable.

Loving each other as men and women love but once in a lifetime, their love was destined to be for ever unconsummated.  They were as irrevocably divided as though the seas of the entire world ran between them.

Wearily, in the flat, level tones of one who realizes that all hope is at an end, she stumbled through the few broken phrases which cancelled the whole happiness of life.

“It all seems so useless, doesn’t it—­your love and mine? . . .  You’ve killed something that I felt for you—­I don’t quite know what to call it—­respect, I suppose, only that sounds silly, because it was much more than that.  I wish—­I wish I didn’t love you still.  But perhaps that, too, will die in time.  You see, you’re not the man I thought I cared for.  You’re—­you’re something I’m ashamed to love—­”