Sara frowned a little.  She was out of tune with the harmony of things.  You need happiness in your heart to be at one with the eager pulsing of new life, the reaching out towards fulfillment that is the essential quality of spring.  Whereas Sara’s heart was empty of happiness and hopes, and of all the joyous beginnings that are the glorious appanage of youth.  There could be no beginnings for her, because she had already reached the end—­reached it with such a stupefying suddenness 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 leisure to readjust her outlook on life, free from the ceaseless reminders that the place held for her.