“I’ll give her time to think—to be afraid!” he repeated; “then——”
The blood hammered in his temples and involuntarily he clenched his strong hands, as if already crushing that weaker woman’s will and subduing it to his own.
But Barbara Preston was not thinking of the fact that Stephen Jarvis had asked her to be his wife. Being a woman, and, moreover, hard driven by cruel necessity, she might have been pardoned, if for a moment she had allowed her thoughts to linger upon the interview which had just ended. She might even have recalled with a certain speculative interest the luxurious interior of the carriage into which he had stepped and the smooth roll of the wheels which had borne him away, safe shut from the wind and the weather. So might she be lifted and sheltered from the bleak peltings of poverty, and life become a smooth progression instead of a painful pilgrimage. The girl sat quite still by the window looking out through misty panes into a mistier world, and only vaguely aware of dripping lilac sprays, ruddy with swelling buds, and of the flash of wet brown wings athwart the gray sky.
Stephen Jarvis, master of fate, and thrilling with the clash of his will upon hers, could hardly have known that the ghost of another man stood between him and the object of this new, urgent desire of his. He would have laughed the shadowy presence to scorn had he known it.
Yet it was this mere shadow of a man which chained Barbara’s thoughts while the April rain softened the landscape to a soft green blur. After all it was but natural that her one pitiful little love story should come back to her now, even to a vision of David Whitcomb’s eager face, his dark impatient eyes, and tossed hair, and the strong clasp of his hand upon hers in the dusk of the summer twilight.
It was Jimmy who had come between them; little motherless Jimmy, then a baby a year old, with big appealing eyes under a fluff of soft yellow hair, and a voice sweeter than any bird’s. All the woman’s heart in her had gone out to the helpless little creature who nestled in her arms at night, and whose eyes and voice followed her as she went about her work by day. This in the days when her father, grown suddenly old and apathetic, had begun to shut himself up in his library, for what purpose Barbara did not guess, at first. When she did know it was too late. The leaves of the book had been long closed and sealed, but the heart within her shivered at the remembrance of what was written there.