She hesitated. Then she caught her breath a little hysterically.
“Why—because—because I just can't believe it! . . . I've seen a lot since I went away. I've seen brave men—and I've seen men . . . who were afraid.” She turned her head aside. “They—the ones who were afraid—didn't look . . . as Garth looks.”
Herrick made no comment. He put a question.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don't know. I expect you think I'm a fool? I've nothing to go on—on the contrary, I've Garth's own admission that—that he was cashiered. And yet——Oh! Miles, if he were only doing anything—now—it would be easier to believe in him! But—he holds absolutely aloof. It's as though he were afraid—still.”
“Have you ever thought”—Herrick spoke slowly, without looking at her—“what this year of war must have meant to a man who has been a soldier—and is one no longer?” His eyes came back to her face meditatively.
“How—what do you mean?” she whispered.
“You've only got to look at the man to know what I mean. I think—since the war broke out—that Trent has been through the bitterness of death.”
“But—but he could have enlisted—got in somehow—under another name, had he wanted to fight. Or he might have gone out and driven an ambulance car—as Lester Kent did.”
Sara was putting to Herrick the very arguments which had arisen in her own mind to confound the intuitive belief of which she had been conscious since that moment of inward revelation on Crabtree Moor—putting them forward in all their repulsive ugliness of fact, in the desperate hope that Herrick might find some way to refute them.