It was a late hour for tramps, and Barbara, brave woman though she was, looked round a little anxiously, to see who the stranger might be. She had but just caught a glimpse of an evidently tired and travel-worn wayfarer--a haggard, dishevelled figure--when he spoke, raising his hat as he did so, with the courteous gesture of a gentleman. "Excuse me, madam, but can you give me a cup of water and a piece of bread, and shelter for an hour?" As he spoke, Barbara glanced up with a start. That voice, it struck upon her ear like an echo from the past. And even in the deepening twilight there seemed to be something familiar in the outlines of face and form. "Who--who are you?" she faltered. It was his turn to start as he heard her voice, and gazed with sudden searching into her pale face in the gloaming. Then she knew him--knew, and yet could hardly believe her eyes, her ears, her instincts--could not realize that in this rough, disordered, unkempt figure, with the torn clothes and the dark stains on his ragged sleeve, she saw the handsome, graceful, debonair lover of her girlhood, the recreant bridegroom who had left her on the very threshold of the altar! "Oliver!" she said, in a low and trembling tone. And as the last faint glimmer of the dying day rested on her face he knew her too. "Barbara!" he ejaculated, as if with a gasp, fairly staggered by the recognition. "Is it--can it be--Barbara?" "Am I so changed?" she rejoined, with a touch of bitterness in her tone. "I--I didn't know--in this light," he stammered. "If--if I had known----" He seemed for the moment more agitated than she. She stood stunned, silent, gazing at him as if in a dream. "I won't intrude on you, Barbara," he said, in a low, unsteady voice. "I didn't know you lived here. It isn't to _you_ that I should have come." "Oliver!" she exclaimed suddenly, waking up as he made a movement to turn away. "Stay! Did you ask for food and shelter?" "I ask nothing from you," he replied, painfully. "Come in," she said, firmly, no longer faltering or tremulous, but with an almost imperious gesture motioning him to enter. "You are tired?" as she noticed his stiff and dragging step. "Sit down while I get a light." She struck a match and lit the lamp. In its yellowish glare she saw that the stains upon his sleeve were red. "What is the matter? You have had some accident," she said, with a scrutinizing but not ungentle glance. "Only a scratch," he answered, in a mechanical way, as if thinking of something else. "But my coat was nearly torn off my back scrambling through the chaparral yonder." He had not taken the chair she pointed out to him, but stood--leaning with the heaviness of fatigue against the shelf that served as a table--looking at her in the lamp-light. She saw how pale and haggard and half-famished-looking he was, and turned promptly to set out the supper.