“There!” she said rather breathlessly. “Is that all?” “All,” he repeated quietly. “And it is all quite right. Thank you.” She looked at him uncertainly. His head was bent, his eyes fixed upon the pile of rustling bank-notes which she had just pushed toward him. A sudden unreasoning sense of dismay fell upon the girl, shadowing the triumph in her face. She made swift retreat toward the door, casting a half-frightened backward look at the sombre figure behind the desk. He did not lift his eyes from their unseeing contemplation of the money, even when the jarring sound of the hard-shut door told him she was gone. Left quite alone Stephen Jarvis slowly folded the notes, sealed them securely in a stout envelope and locked them in his safe. XIII YOUNG WHITCOMB sat quite at his ease in Donald Preston’s big arm-chair, one leg flung carelessly over the other, his handsome head thrown back, its riotous curls shining in the lamp-light. His blue eyes, full of laughter, were set upon Barbara. “So you thought I was dead, did you?” he asked, in a bantering tone; “but it didn’t appear to bother you much. You’re looking handsomer than ever, Barbara. I had an idea I’d find you—changed.” He waited for some sort of reply; but Barbara was trying hard to reconcile the ruddy, smiling man, who sat so unconcernedly in her dead father’s place, with the pallid, serious, large-eyed phantom of her dreams. She had been looking at him in puzzled silence, and now her glance disengaged itself from his with an effort. “I’ll wager,” he said, “that you have been thinking of me with ’a crown upon my forehead, a harp within my hand,’ the way we used to sing in Sunday school when we were kids. Now own up! And you’re disappointed to find that I’m such a commonplace, live-looking chap—eh, Barbara?” “I find you—changed,” she confessed, in a low voice, “greatly changed.” David Whitcomb laughed triumphantly. “Yes; I flatter myself that the pious pedagogue has been pretty well knocked out of me in the last five years. Good Lord! what a solemn, sentimental ass I must have been in those days. It was a lucky thing for me that you sent me about my business. Still,—Barbara, I’d give a gold nugget to know just what you thought when they told you I’d passed in my checks. Did you picture poor David lying cold and pale under some frozen cairn along the Yukon trail? That’s the way they dispose of unlucky prospectors up north; just dig a hole in the snow and drop ’em in; then pile stones on top to keep off the wolves. Ugh! I can hear ’em howl, if I stop to to think, now. Did you drop a tear on that imaginary grave of mine up in the Arctic; did you, Barbara?” Her eyes evaded his smiling blue gaze. “Why should you ask?” she hesitated. “It was a great surprise—a great shock.” “You refer, of course, to the news of my death,” he said. “But you survived the shock, as you call it, and—you are far more beautiful than I remembered you.”