By Iza Duffus Hardy.
arbara Thorne sat leaning her head on her hand, looking at a photograph that lay on the table beneath her eyes. She had not intended to look for that when she pulled out a dusty drawer full of old letters, papers, and account-books to arrange and set in order. But when in the course of her rummaging and tidying she found that picture in her hand, she paused in her task. The neglected drawer stood open, with its dusty packets and rolls of faded papers. Barbara had forgotten it and all else around her.
She sat there lost in memory, her eyes fixed upon the "counterfeit presentment" of the face that once had been all the world to her. She did not often think of Oliver Desmond now; to think of him meant only pain—pain of outraged pride and wounded love. She had outgrown the time when she could not tear her thoughts from him, when his face was in her "mind's eye" by night and day, and yet she shrank with a shuddering revolt of anguish from those pictures of the past which she could not banish. For the memory that was the locked-up skeleton of her life—that rattled its dead bones to-day as Oliver Desmond's pictured eyes smiled into hers—was a cruel memory indeed, of grief and wrong and bitter humiliation, of broken troth and shattered faith, insulted love, and crushed and martyred pride. The blow that had rankled like iron in her heart for years was base and cowardly as a stab in the back from the hand that should have shielded and cherished her.
How strange it seemed to her to-day to think she had outlived it all—the love, the anguish, the bitterness, which once had seemed undying! There was nothing to disturb her reverie; she was alone, had been alone all day, and yet not lonely, albeit this solitary Californian ranch, in a secluded valley amongst the foot-hills of the Sierras, was a lonesome-looking place enough. But Barbara had been too busy all day to sit down and realize the loneliness. She lived on the Saucel Ranch with her married brother and his wife, she and her sister-in-law doing all the housework between them—servants or "helps" being unattainable luxuries in those parts. Mr. and Mrs. Thorne had gone out for all the day and all the night; a nervous woman might well have shrunk from being thus left alone and unprotected in such a place; but if Barbara had ever been troubled with the nineteenth century malady of "nerves," she had lived it down since she had taken up her abode on the Saucel Ranch. Her hands were always full. Even now, her day's task done, she had set herself to "improve the shining hour" by "tidying-up" the bureau drawer, in which she
