He limped across to her.
“Not a stroke of work for you to-day,” he said decisively, taking the bundle of letters out of her hands. “Now tell me what's wrong?”
She looked away from him, a slow, shamed red creeping into her face. At last—
“I've seen Garth,” she said very low.
Herrick nodded. He knew what that meeting had meant to one of these two friends of his. Now he was to see the reverse of the medal. He waited, his silence sympathetic and far more helpful than any eager, probing question, however well-intentioned.
“Miles,” she burst out suddenly, “I'm—I'm wretched!”
“How's that?” He did not make the mistake of attributing her outburst to a transient mood of depression. Something deeper lay behind it.
“Since I saw Garth yesterday I've been asking myself whether—whether I've been doing him a ghastly injustice”—she moistened her dry lips—“whether he was really guilty of—running away.”
“Ah!” Miles stuffed his hands in his pockets and limped the length of the room and back. In that moment, he realized something of the maddening, galling restraint of the bondage under which Garth Trent had lived for years—the bondage of silence, and, within his pockets, his hands were clenched when he halted again at Sara's side.
“Why?” he shot at her.