Left quite alone Stephen Jarvis slowly folded the notes, sealed them securely in a stout envelope and locked them in his safe.
XIII
Young Whitcomb sat quite at his ease in Donald Preston’s big arm-chair, one leg flung carelessly over the other, his handsome head thrown back, its riotous curls shining in the lamp-light. His blue eyes, full of laughter, were set upon Barbara.
“So you thought I was dead, did you?” he asked, in a bantering tone; “but it didn’t appear to bother you much. You’re looking handsomer than ever, Barbara. I had an idea I’d find you—changed.”
He waited for some sort of reply; but Barbara was trying hard to reconcile the ruddy, smiling man, who sat so unconcernedly in her dead father’s place, with the pallid, serious, large-eyed phantom of her dreams. She had been looking at him in puzzled silence, and now her glance disengaged itself from his with an effort.
“I’ll wager,” he said, “that you have been thinking of me with ’a crown upon my forehead, a harp within my hand,’ the way we used to sing in Sunday school when we were kids. Now own up! And you’re disappointed to find that I’m such a commonplace, live-looking chap—eh, Barbara?”
“I find you—changed,” she confessed, in a low voice, “greatly changed.”