“I didn’t ask you,” she said, “because——”
“Well?” he questioned sharply. “You didn’t ask me for help because——”
“How could I?” she demanded, with a spirited lift of her head. “I asked you for help before and you refused.”
“Did I?” he said gravely. “Well, I offered you—a position. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”
Barbara’s heart beat suffocatingly fast. His eyes were on her face, compelling her, mastering her.
“Would you—Could I take care of Jimmy just the same?” she asked, in a muffled voice.
He gave his horse a sharp cut with the whip before he answered.
“I can’t see why you should bring the boy into our affairs,” he said coldly. “But he can live with us—for the present, if you like. Then there is the Preston farm; as I’ve already told you, you may do as you like with it.”
Barbara looked mistily away over the fields past which they were driving, the sound of meadow-larks, calling and answering, and the soft jubilant gurgle of a bluebird on a nearer fence-rail reaching her like vaguely reproachful voices out of a dead past. Then as now had the meadow-larks called “Sweet! oh, my sweet!”—in the one spring-time when David Whitcomb loved her.
“I shall have to—to think,” she murmured. “I am afraid——”
She did not answer, and again he cut the horse impatiently with his keen whip-lash, holding the spirited creature with a strong grasp on the reins as he did so.
“Well,” he said, after a long silence, “I’m afraid I can’t make myself over, even for you. But I’ll tell you something, my girl, there are worse men in the world than Stephen Jarvis, and perhaps you’ll fall in with some of ’em, if you turn me down. Look at me, will you?”
“I shall not take a silly _no_ for an answer,” he said under his breath. “I never have, and I shan’t begin with you. I need you, and you need me.”
“No,” said Barbara faintly. She could not bring herself to uncover her one dead love before those pitiless eyes, while the meadow-larks were calling and answering with such piercing sweetness. David Whitcomb was dead. If she had ever loved him it was as another self in a dim past, growing ever dimmer.
“Then,” said the Honorable Stephen Jarvis quietly, “you will marry me.” He broke into a short laugh. “Do you know I couldn’t bear to think of your loving another man? Is that being in love? Tell me, Barbara.”