A full week had elapsed since the night of that eventful journey in pursuit of Molly, and from the moment when Garth had given Sara into the safe keeping of Jane Crab till the moment when he came upon her by the pergola at Rose Cottage, perched on the top of a ladder, engaged in tying back the exuberance of a Crimson Rambler, they had not met.

And now, as he halted at the foot of the ladder, Sara was conscious that her spirits had suddenly bounded up to impossible heights at the sight of the lean, dark face upturned to her.

“The Lavender Lady and Miles are pottering about in the greenhouse,” she announced explanatorily, waving her hand in the direction of a distant glimmer of glass beyond the high box hedge which flanked the rose-garden.

“Are they?” Trent, thus arrested in the progress of his search for his host and hostess, seemed entirely indifferent as to whether it were ever completed or not. He leaned against one of the rose-wreathed pillars of the pergola and gazed negligently in the direction Sara indicated.

“How is Miss Molly?” he asked.

Sara twinkled.

“She is just beginning to discard sackcloth and ashes for something more becoming,” she informed him gravely.

“That's good. Are you—are you all right after your tumble? I'm making these kind inquiries because, since it was my car out of which you elected to fall, I feel a sense of responsibility.”

Sara descended from the ladder before she replied. Then she remarked composedly—

“It has taken precisely seven days, apparently, for that sense of responsibility to develop.”

“On the contrary, for seven days my thirst for knowledge has been only restrained by the pointings of conscience.”

“Then”—she spoke rather low—“was it conscience pointing you—away from Sunnyside?”

His hazel eyes flashed over her face.

“Perhaps it was—discretion,” he suggested. “Looking in at shop windows when one has an empty purse is a poor occupation—and one to be avoided.”

“Did you want to come?” she persisted gently.

Half absently he had cut off a piece of dead wood from the rose-bush next him and was twisting it idly to and fro between his fingers. At her words, the dead wood stem snapped suddenly in his clenched hand. For an instant he seemed about to make some passionate rejoinder. Then he slowly unclenched his hand and the broken twig fell to the ground.

“Haven't I made it clear to you—yet,” he said slowly, “that what I want doesn't enter into the scheme of things at all?”

The brief speech held a sense of impending finality, and, in the silence which followed, the eyes of the man and woman met, questioned each other desperately, and answered.

There are moments when modesty is a false quantity, and when the big happinesses of life depend on a woman's capacity to realize this and her courage to act upon it. To Sara, it seemed that such a moment had come to her, and the absolute sincerity of her nature met it unafraid.

“No,” she said quietly. “You have only made clear to me—what you want, Garth. Need we—pretend to each other any longer?”

“I don't understand,” he muttered.

“Don't you?” She drew a littler nearer him, and the face she lifted to his was very white. But her eyes were shining. “That night—when I fell from the car—I—I wasn't unconscious.”

For an instant he stared at her, incredulous. Then he swung aside a little, his hand gripping the pillar against which he had been leaning till his knuckles showed white beneath the straining skin.

“You—weren't unconscious?” he repeated blankly.

“No—not all the time. I—heard—what you said.”

He seemed to pull himself together.

“Oh, Heaven only knows what I may have said at a moment like that,” he answered carelessly, but his voice was rough and hoarse. “A man talks wild when the woman he's with only misses death by a hair's breath.”

Sara's lips upturned at the corners in a slow smile—a smile that was neither mocking, nor tender, nor chiding, but an exquisite blending of all three. She caught her breath quickly—Trent could hear its soft sibilance. Then she spoke.

“Will you marry me, please, Garth?”

He drew back from her, violently, his underlip hard bitten. At last, after a long silence—

“No!” he burst out harshly. “No! I can't!”

For an instant she was shaken. Then, buoyed up by the memory of that night when she had lain in his arms and when the agony of the moment had stripped him of all power to hide his love, she challenged his denial.

“Why not?” Her voice was vibrant. “You love me!”

“Yes . . . I love you.” The words seemed torn from him.

“Then why won't you marry me?”

It did not seem to her that she was doing anything unusual or unwomanly. The man she loved had carried his burden single-handed long enough. The time had come when for his own sake as well as for hers, she must wring the truth from him, make him break through the silence which had long been torturing them both. Whatever might be the outcome, whether pain or happiness, they must share it.

“Why won't you marry me, Garth?”

The little question, almost voiceless in its intensity, clamoured loudly at his heart.

“Don't tempt me!” he cried out hoarsely. “My God! I wonder if you know how you are tempting me?”

She came a little closer to him, laying her hand on his arm, while her great, sombre eyes silently entreated him.

As though the touch of her were more than he could bear, his hard-held passion crashed suddenly through the bars his will had set about it.

He caught her in his arms, lifting her sheer off her feet against his breast, whilst his lips crushed down upon her mouth and throat, burned against her white, closed lids, and the hard clasp of his arms about her was a physical pain—an exquisite agony that it was a fierce joy to suffer.

“Then—then you do love me?” She leaned against him, breathless, her voice unsteady, her whole slender body shaken with an answering passion.

“Love you?” The grip of his arms about her made response. “Love you? I love you with my soul and my body, here and through whatever comes Hereafter. You are my earth and heaven—the whole meaning of things—” He broke off abruptly, and she felt his arms slacken their hold and slowly unclasp as though impelled to it by some invisible force.

“What was I saying?” The heat of passion had gone out of his voice, leaving it suddenly flat and toneless. “'The whole meaning of things?'” He gave a curious little laugh. It had 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—”

“You certainly tried hard enough to convince me that you didn't,” she interrupted ruefully.

“Yes, I tried. And I failed. And now, all that remains is for me to go away. I shall never forgive myself for having brought pain into your life—I, who would so gladly have brought only happiness. . . . God in Heaven!”—he whispered to himself as though the thought were almost blinding in the promise of ecstasy it held—“To have been the one to bring you happiness! . . .” He fell silent, his mouth wrung and twisted with pain.

Presently her voice came to him again, softly supplicating. “I shall never forgive you—if you go away and leave me,” she added. “I can't do without you now—now that I know you care.”

“But I must go! I can't marry you—you haven't understood—”

“Haven't I?” She smiled—a small, wise, wonderful smile that began somewhere deep in her heart and touched her lips and lingered in her eyes.

“Tell me,” she said. “Are you married, Garth?”

He started.

“Married! God forbid!”

“And if you married me, would you be wronging any one?”

“Only you yourself,” he answered grimly.

“Then nothing else matters. You are free—and I'm free. And I love you!”

She leaned towards him, her hands outheld, her mouth still touched with that little, mystic smile. “Please—tell me all over again now much you love me.”

But no answering hands met hers. Instead, he drew away from her and faced her, stern-lipped.

“I must make you understand,” he said. “You don't know what it is that you are asking. I've made shipwreck of my life, and I must pay the penalty. But, by God, I'm not going to let you pay it, too! And if you married me, you would have to pay. You would be joining your life to that of an outcast. I can never go out into the world as other men may. If I did”—slowly—“if I did, sooner or later I should be driven away—thrust back into my solitude. I have nothing to offer—nothing to give—only a life that has been cursed from the outset. Don't misunderstand me,” he went on quickly. “I'm not complaining, bidding for your sympathy. If a man's a fool, he must be prepared to pay for his folly—even though it means a life penalty for a moment's madness. And I shall have to pay—to the uttermost farthing. Mine's the kind of debt which destiny never remits.” He paused; then added defiantly: “The woman who married me would have to share in that payment—to go out with me into the desert in which I lie, and she would have to do this without knowing what she was paying for, or why the door of the world is locked against me. My lips are sealed, nor shall I ever be able to break the seal. Now do you understand why I can never ask you, or any other woman to be my wife?”

Sara looked at him curiously; he could not read the expression of her face.

“Have you finished?” she asked. “Is that all?”

“All? Isn't it enough?”—with a grim laugh.

“And you are letting this—this folly of your youth stand between us?”

“The world applies a harder word than folly to it!”

“I don't care anything at all about the world. What do you call it?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I call it folly to ask the criminal in the dock whether he approves the judge's verdict. He's hardly likely to!”

For a moment she was silent. Then she seemed to gather herself together.

“Garth, do you love me?”

The words fell clearly on the still, summer air.

“Yes”—doggedly—“I love you. What then?”

“What then? Why—this! I don't care what you've done. It doesn't matter to me whether you are an outcast or not. If you are, then I'm willing to be an outcast with you. Oh, Garth—My Garth! I've been begging you to marry me all afternoon, and—and——” with a broken little laugh—“you can't keep on refusing me!”

Before her passionate faith and trust the barriers he had raised between them came crashing down. His arms went round her, and for a few moments they clung together and love wiped out all bitter memories of the past and all the menace of the future.

But presently he came back to his senses. Very gently he put her from him.

“It's not right,” he stammered unsteadily. “I can't accept this from you. Dear, you must let me go away. . . . I can't spoil your beautiful life by joining it to mine!”

She drew his arm about her shoulders again.

“You will spoil it if you go away. Oh! Garth, you dear, foolish man! When will you understand that love is the only thing that matters? If you had committed all the sins in the Decalogue, I shouldn't care! You're mine now”—jealously—“my lover. And I'm not going to be thrust out of your life for some stupid scruple. Let the past take care of itself. The present is ours. And—and I love you, Garth!”

It was difficult to reason coolly with her arms about him, her lips so near his own, and his great love for her pulling at his heart. But he made one further effort.

“If you should ever regret it, Sara?” he whispered. “I don't think I could bear that.”

She looked at him with steady eyes.

“You will not have it to bear,” she said. “I shall never regret it.”

Still he hesitated. But the dawn of a great hope grew and deepened in his face.

“If you could be content to live here—at Far End . . . It is just possible!” He spoke reflectively, as though debating the matter with himself. “The curse has not followed me to this quiet little corner of the earth. Perhaps—after all . . . Sara, could you stand such a life? Or would you always be longing to get out into the great world? As I've told you, the world is shut to me. There's that in my past which blocks the way to any future. Have you the faith—the courage—to face that?”

Her eyes, steadfast and serene, met his.

“I have courage to face anything—with you, Garth. But I haven't courage to face living without you.”

He bent his head and kissed her on the mouth—a slow, lingering kiss that held something far deeper and more enduring than mere passion. And Sara, as she kissed him back, her soul upon her lips, felt as though together they had partaken of love's holy sacrament.

“Beloved”—Garth's voice, unspeakably tender, came to her through the exquisite silence of the moment—“Beloved, it shall be as you wish. Whether I am right or wrong in taking this great gift you offer me—God knows! If I am wrong—then, please Heaven, whatever punishment there be may fall on me alone.”