The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29,
May 1893, by Various

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893
An Illustrated Monthly

Author: Various

Editor: George Newnes

Release Date: November 10, 2009 [EBook #30443]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRAND MAGAZINE, MAY 1893 ***

Produced by Victorian/Edwardian Pictorial Magazines,
Jonathan Ingram, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

THE

STRAND MAGAZINE

_An Illustrated Monthly_

Vol. 5, Issue. 29.

May 1893

[Illustration: "EXCUSE OUR INTRUSION, MADAM."

(_In the Shadow of the Sierras._)]

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SIERRAS

BY IZA DUFFUS HARDY.

Barbara 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