, and prepared to light the lamp
and make herself some tea. She was thus engaged when she heard a step
outside the open door--not the quick, confident step of a friendly
visitor, but a hurried yet hesitating tread--a tread that suggested
skulking and hanging about.

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