Sara felt herself slipping, knew that she was losing her hold of herself. Soon she would be a-wash in a sea of love, helpless to resist as a bit of driftwood, and then the waters would close over her head and she would be drawn down into the depths of shame which yielding to her love for Garth involved.
She must go—leave him while she had the power. Summoning up her strength, she faced him.
“I do,” she answered steadily. “But I pray God every night of my life that I may soon cease to care.”
And with those few words, limitless in their scorn—for him, and for herself because she still loved him—she turned to go.
But their contempt seemed to pass him by. His eyes burned.
“So Elisabeth has played her stake—and lost!” he muttered to himself. “Ah! Pardon!” he drew aside as she almost brushed past him in her sudden haste to escape—to get away—and stood, with bared head, his eyes fixed on her receding figure.
Soon a bend in the path through the fields hid her from his sight. But, long after she had disappeared, he remained leaning, motionless, against the gateway through which she had passed, his face immobile, twisted and drawn so that it resembled some sculptured mask of Pain, his eyes staring straight in front of him, blank and unseeing.
“Hullo, Trent!”
Miles Herrick, returning from the town to the hospital and taking, like every one else, the short cut across the fields, waved a friendly arm as he caught sight of Garth's figure silhouetted against the sky-line.
Then he drew nearer, and the set, still face of the other filled him with a sudden sense of dismay. There was a new look in it, a kind of dogged hopelessness. It entirely lacked that suggestion of austere sweetness which had made it so difficult to reconcile his smirched reputation with the man himself.