er and pain struggled equally matched.

"I found that photograph by chance while I was looking over a drawer
full of old papers," she replied, answering the spirit rather than, the
letter of his words.

"And you were looking at it as if--as if--it was all the world to you!"
he retorted.

"My looks belied me, then. It is a memory only--and a painful one," she
said, with the slightest shade of a tremor in her sweet voice.

"Only a memory?" fixing the stern questioning of his piercing eyes upon
her.

"If it were more, should I be what I am to you?" she replied, meeting
his look frankly.

"What are you to me?" he demanded. The words might have sounded brutal
had the tone been different, but though they were harshly spoken, they
bore no suggestion of denial or rebuff, no faintest hint of insulting
disclaimer. "You know," he continued, "we both know, that you're the one
woman in the world to me--but what more? What beyond that? Are you the
woman who _cares_ for me?"

[Illustration: "HE GLANCED AT IT."]

"For you more than for all the world beside."

"More than for----?" He cast a frowning glance at the photograph.

"Immeasurably more," she answered steadily, and the unconquerable truth
in her forced her to add the word, "to-day!"

"To-day?" he echoed, with mingled anger and reluctant admiration.
"Barbara, you are too honest to deny----" He paused with a quick
indrawing of the breath and setting of the teeth.

"To deny the past?" her soft voice interposed as he paused. "Yes! I
could never deny it! You know, Rick, you always knew, that I could not
give you my yesterdays!"

"Barbara, I am jealous of those yesterdays," he said, after a silence.

"Why begrudge the yesterdays," she pleaded, "when all the to-morrows are
yours?"

His dark eyes kindled with a deep and tender glow.

"All? All? None to share with me, or rob me? All mine?" He framed her
delicate fair face between his big brown hands, and held it thus gently
upturned to his as he gazed intently into it. "Barbara," he added, "do
you know it would be a bad thing for any man who came between me and
you?"

"No one could," she assured him earnestly.

Colonel Jeff clasped her in his strong arms.

"Is that so, indeed, my darling? my Barbara! my own one love," he
whispered, pressing her to his heart.

"You must not be jealous of the past, dear Rick," she murmured.

"Forgive me my blundering roughness," he entreated her. "I ought not to
have spoken so t