Audrey laughed.
“My dear, what else could I do with my money? I've got such a sickening lot of it, you see! Besides”—with a bantering glance at her husband—“I think it was only the prospect of being of some use at my hospital which induced Miles to marry me! He's my private secretary, you know, and boss of the commissariat department.”
Miles saluted.
“Quartermaster, at your service, miss,” he said cheerfully, adding with a chuckle: “I saw my chance of getting a job if I married Audrey, so of course I took it.”
He was looking amazingly well. The fact of being of some use in the world had acted upon him like a tonic, and there was no misinterpreting the glance of complete and happy understanding that passed between him and his wife.
Glad as she was to see it, it served to remind Sara painfully of all that she had missed, to stir anew the aching longing for Garth Trent, which, though struggled against, and beaten down, and sometimes temporarily crowded out by the thousand claims of each day's labour, had been with her all through the long months of her absence from Monkshaven.
It was this which had worn her so fine, not the hard physical work that she had been doing. Always slender, and built on racing lines, there was something almost ethereal about her now, and her sombre eyes looked nearly double their size in her small face of which the contour was so painfully distinct. Yet she was as vivid and alive as ever; she seemed to diffuse, as it were, a kind of spiritual brilliance.
“She makes one think of a flame,” Audrey told her husband when they were alone once more. “There is something so vital about her, in spite of that curiously frail look she has.”
Miles nodded.
“She's burning herself out,” he said briefly.