“Never—­marry!” she repeated dazedly.  Quick fear seized her, and she rushed on impetuously:  “Then you haven’t forgiven me, after all—­you don’t believe that I trust you!  Oh!  How can I make you know that I do?  Garth—­”

“Oh, my dear,” he interrupted swiftly.  “Don’t misunderstand me.  I know that you believe in me now—­and I thank God for it!  And as for forgiveness, as I told you, I have nothing to forgive.  You’d have had need of the faith that removes mountains”—­Sara started at the repetition of Patrick’s very words—­“to have believed in me under the circumstances.”  He paused a moment, and when he spoke again there was something triumphant in his tones—­a serene gladness and contentment.  “You and I, beloved, are right with each other—­now and always.  Nothing can ever again come between us to divide us as we have been divided this last year.  But, none the less,” and his voice took on a steadfast note of resolve, “I cannot marry you.  I thought I could—­I thought the past had sunk into oblivion, and that I might take the gift of love you offered me. . . .  But I was wrong.”

“No!  No!  You were not wrong!” She was clinging to him in a sudden terror that even now their happiness was slipping from them.  “The past has nothing to say to you and me.  It can’t come between us. . . .  You have only to take me, Garth”—­tremulously.  “Let me show that my love is stronger than ill repute.  Let me come to you and stand by you as your wife.  The past can’t hurt us, then!”

He shook his head.

“The past never loses its power to hurt,” he answered.  “I’ve learned that.  As far as the world you belong to is concerned, I’m finished, and I won’t drag the woman I love through the same hell I’ve been through.  That’s what it would mean, you know.  You would be singled out, pointed at, as the wife of a man who was chucked out of the Service.  There would be no place in the world for you.  You would be ostracized—­because you were my wife.”

“I shouldn’t care,” she urged.  “Surely I can bear—­what you have borne? . . .  I shouldn’t mind—­anything—­so long as we were together.”

He drew her close to him, his lips against her hair.

“Beloved!” he said, a great wonder in his voice.  “Oh!  Little brave thing!  What have I ever done that you should love me like that?”

Sara winked away a tear, and a rather tremulous smile hovered round her mouth.

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” she acknowledged a little shakily.  “But I do.  Garth, you will marry me?”

He lifted his bent head, his eyes gazing straight ahead of him, as though envisioning the lonely future and defying it.

“No,” he said resolutely.  “No.  God helping me, I will never marry you, Sara.  I have—­no right to marry.  It could only bring you misery.  Dear, I must shield you, even from yourself—­from your own big, generous impulses which would let you join your life to mine. . . .  Love is denied to us—­denied through my own act of long ago.  But if you’ll give me friendship. . . .”  She could sense the sudden passionate entreaty behind the words.  “Sara!  Friendship is worth while—­such friendship as ours would be!  Are you brave enough, strong enough, to give me that—­since I may not ask for more?”