“Uncle Harold malevolent! That isn’t very nice of you to say.”
“He asked me if I thought our marriage should take place.”
“And you said——?”
“Nothing.”
“David!”
“I am unworthy of you, Una—I feel it. There are men, you know, who have in their past things that make them unworthy the woman they love. I confess, there are dark shadows, haunting things in my past. I can’t explain them, even to myself. I don’t altogether know what they are—queer as that sounds! But—some day they might come between us. When I rode over just now, I made up my mind to try to tell you. You ought to know——”
“David,” she interrupted, “I don’t want to know. I love you as you are to-day. If you were different in the past, before I knew you, I don’t care to hear about it.”
In spite of his self-depreciation, in the eyes of the world David Meudon would be regarded in every way a worthy suitor for the hand of Una Leighton. Clean of stock, so far as the gifts of blood and social station go, he had inherited besides a fortune that would be considered large even in a nation of millionaires. This inheritance, coming to him through the death of his father and mother in the middle of his college course, had not proved a snare to him. After completing his education, he had traveled extensively, not through an idle curiosity to see the world, but from a wish to perfect himself in certain studies calling for a wider knowledge than could be gathered from books or tutors.
It was during his travels abroad, after he had left his eccentric schoolmate, Raoul Arthur, in India, that David first met Una Leighton, who was spending a winter in England with her uncle. The meeting ripened into an intimacy that survived the distractions of European travel, and drew David, a constant visitor, to the picturesque old mansion, Una’s home, on the outskirts of the little Connecticut village of Rysdale.