The Hermit of Far End Part 9

"Although I don't understand why such a good man at his job should be practicing in a little one-horse place like Monkshaven," retorted Geoffrey maliciously.

"Probably he went there on account of his wife's health," suggested Elisabeth. "He says she is an invalid."

"Oh, well"--Geoffrey yielded unwillingly--"I suppose you'll go, Sara.

But if the experiment isn't a success you must come back to us at once.

Is that a bargain?"

Sara hesitated.

"Promise," commanded Geoffrey. "Or"--firmly--"I'm hanged if we let you go at all."

"Very well," agreed Sara meekly. "I'll promise."

"I hope the experiment will be an utter failure," observed Tim, later on, when he and Sara were alone together. He spoke with an oddly curt--almost inimical--inflection in his voice.

"Now that's unkind of you, Tim," she protested smilingly. "I thought you were a good enough pal not to want to chortle over me--as I know Geoffrey will--should the thing turn out a frost!"

"Well, I'm not, then," he returned roughly.

The churlish tones were so unlike Tim that Sara looked up at him in some amazement. He was staring down at her with a strange, _awakened_ expression in his eyes; his face was very white and his mouth working.

With a sudden apprehension of what was impending, she sprang up, stretching out her hand as though to ward it off.

"No--no, Tim. It isn't--don't say it's that----"

He caught her hand and held it between both his.

"But it _is_ that," he said, speaking very fast, the serenity of his face all broken up by the surge of emotion that had gripped him. "It is that. I love you. I didn't know it till you spoke of going away. Sara--"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" She broke in hastily. "Don't say any more, Tim--please don't!"

In the silence that followed the two young faces peered at each other--the one desperate with love, the other full of infinite regret and pleading.

At last--

"It's no use, then?" said Tim dully. "You don't care?"

"I'm afraid I don't--not like that. I thought we were friends--just friends, Tim," she urged.

Tim lifted his head, and she saw that somehow, in the last few minutes, he had grown suddenly older. His gay, smiling mouth had set itself sternly; the beautiful boyish face had become a man's.

"I thought so, too," he said gently. "But I know now that what I feel for you isn't friends.h.i.+p. It's"--with a short, grim laugh--"something much more than that. Tell me, Sara--will there ever be any chance for me?"

She hesitated. She was so genuinely fond of him that she hated to give him pain. Looking at him, standing before her in his splendid young manhood, she wondered irritably why she _didn't_ love him. He was pre-eminently loveable.

He caught eagerly at her hesitation.

"Don't answer me now!" he said swiftly. "I'll wait--give me a chance.

I can't take no . . . I won't take it!" he went on masterfully. "I love you!" Impetuously he slipped his strong young arms about her and kissed her on the mouth.

The previous moment she had been all softness and regret, but now, at the sudden pa.s.sion in his voice, something within her recoiled violently, repudiating the claim his love had made upon her.

Sara was the last woman in the world to be taken by storm. She was too individual, her sense of personal independence too strongly developed, for her ever to be swept off her feet by a pa.s.sion to which her own heart offered no response. Instead, it roused her to a definite consciousness of opposition, and she drew herself away from Tim's eager arms with a decision there was no mistaking.

"I'm sorry, Tim," she said quietly. "But it's no good pretending I'm in love with you. I'm not."

He looked at her with moody, dissatisfied eyes.

"I've spoken too soon," he said. "I should have waited. Only I was afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Yes." He spoke uncertainly. "I've had a feeling that if I let you go, you'll meet some man down there, at Monkshaven, who'll want to marry you . . . And I shall lose you! . . . Oh, Sara! I don't ask you to say you love me--yet. Say that you'll marry me . . . I'd teach you the rest--you'd learn to love me."

But that fierce, unpremeditated kiss--the first lover's kiss that she had known--had endowed her with a sudden clarity of vision.

"No," she answered steadily. "I don't know much about love, Tim, but I'm very sure it's no use trying to manufacture it to order, and--listen, Tim, dear," the pain in his face making her suddenly all tenderness again--"if I married you, and afterwards you _couldn't_ teach me as you think you could, we should only be wretched together."

"I could never be wretched if you were my wife," he answered doggedly.

"I've love enough for two."

She shook her head.

"No, Tim. Don't let's spoil a good friends.h.i.+p by turning it into a one-sided love-affair."

He smiled rather grimly.

"I'm afraid it's too late to prevent that," he said drily. "But I won't worry you any more now, dear. Only--I'm not going to accept your answer as final."

"I wish you would," she urged.

He looked at her curiously. "No man who loves you, Sara, is going to give you up very easily," he averred. Then, after a moment: "you'll let me write to you sometimes?"

She nodded soberly.

"Yes--but not love-letters, Tim."

"No--not love-letters."

He lifted her hands and kissed first one and then the other. Then, with his head well up and his shoulders squared, he went away.

But the sea-blue eyes that had been wont to look out on the world so gaily had suddenly lost their care-free bravery. They were the eyes of a man who has looked for the first time into the radiant, sorrowful face of Love, and read therein all the possibilities--the glory and the pain and the supreme happiness--which Love holds.

And Sara, standing alone and regretful that the friend had been lost in the lover, never guessed that Tim's love was a thread which was destined to cross and re-cross those other threads held by the fingers of Fate until it had tangled the whole fabric of her life.