Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/434

"For you more than for all the world beside."

"More than for ——?" He cast a frowning glance at the photograph.

"Immeasurably more," she answered steadily, and the unconquerable truth in her forced her to add the word, "to-day!"

"To-day?" he echoed, with mingled anger and reluctant admiration. "Barbara, you are too honest to deny———" He paused with a quick indrawing of the breath and setting of the teeth.

"To deny the past?" her soft voice interposed as he paused. "Yes! I could never deny it! You know, Rick, you always knew, that I could not give you my yesterdays!"

"Barbara, I am jealous of those yesterdays," he said, after a silence.

"Why begrudge the yesterdays," she pleaded, "when all the to-morrows are yours?"

His dark eyes kindled with a deep and tender glow.

"All? All? None to share with me, or rob me? All mine?" He framed her delicate fair face between his big brown hands, and held it thus gently upturned to his as he gazed intently into it. "Barbara," he added, "do you know it would be a bad thing for any man who came between me and you?"

"No one could," she assured him earnestly.

Colonel Jeff clasped her in his strong arms.

"Is that so, indeed, my darling? my Barbara! my own one love," he whispered, pressing her to his heart.

"You must not he jealous of the past, dear Rick," she murmured.

"Forgive me my blundering roughness," he entreated her. "I ought not to have spoken so to you. Forgive me if I have hurt you, Barbara!"

"It did hurt me a little," she admitted. "Let us leave the dead bones to rest in their grave."

"I will never dig them up again," he promised her. "But put that away," he added, pushing the portrait aside. "It's very like him, and I hate to see it near you!"

Colonel Jeff had known Oliver Desmond, at least by sight and passing acquaintance, and he knew—as who did not?—Barbara Thorne's story; who had not heard the story of the bride deserted at the very altar, waiting in her bridal dress amongst the assembled party of her own and his friends—waiting for the bridegroom who never came?

Sometimes even now, when the memory of that horrible day came over Barbara, she shivered and turned sick and cold at heart. Only since she had known Rick Jeffreys loved her she had thought of it less; the scar of the old wound had ceased to throb.

At first she had thought Oliver Desmond was dead; felt sure that nothing but death could have kept him from her at that hour! But afterwards she and all the world—their world—learnt that he had left her for another; the one palliation of the cruel wrong and insult he had inflicted on his innocent and trusting betrothed being that it was no new love, but the resurrection of an old, supposed-to-be-dead passion that had lured him from her. Then they heard now and again rumours of Oliver Desmond's