Sara made no answer. She felt stunned—beaten into helpless silence by the quiet, inexorable voice that, bit by bit, minute by minute, had drawn aside the veil of ignorance and revealed the dry bones and rottenness that lay hidden behind it.
“I don't believe it!” she had cried in a futile effort to convince herself by the sheer reiteration of denial. But she did believe it, nevertheless. The whole miserable story tallied too accurately with the bitterly significant remarks that Garth himself had let fall from time to time.
That day of the dog-fight, for instance. What was it he had said? “A certain amount of allowance must be made for nerves.”
And again: “I suppose no man can be dead sure of himself—always.”
The implication was too horribly clear to be evaded.
He had told her, moreover, that he was a man who had made a shipwreck of his life, that in a moment of folly—a moment of funk she knew now to be the veridical description!—he had flung away the whole chances of his life. The man whom she had loved, and, in her love, idealized, had proved himself, when the test came, that most despicable of things, a coward! The pain of realization was almost unbearable.
Suddenly, across the utter desolation of the moment there shot a single ray of hope. She turned triumphantly to Elisabeth.
“But if it were true that Garth—had shown cowardice, why was he not shot? They shoot men for cowardice”—grimly.
“There are many excuses to be made for him, Sara,” replied Elisabeth gently.
“Excuses! For cowardice!” The low-spoken words were icy with a biting contempt. “I'm afraid I could not find them.”