David Whitcomb laughed triumphantly.
“Yes; I flatter myself that the pious pedagogue has been pretty well knocked out of me in the last five years. Good Lord! what a solemn, sentimental ass I must have been in those days. It was a lucky thing for me that you sent me about my business. Still,—Barbara, I’d give a gold nugget to know just what you thought when they told you I’d passed in my checks. Did you picture poor David lying cold and pale under some frozen cairn along the Yukon trail? That’s the way they dispose of unlucky prospectors up north; just dig a hole in the snow and drop ’em in; then pile stones on top to keep off the wolves. Ugh! I can hear ’em howl, if I stop to to think, now. Did you drop a tear on that imaginary grave of mine up in the Arctic; did you, Barbara?”
Her eyes evaded his smiling blue gaze.
“Why should you ask?” she hesitated. “It was a great surprise—a great shock.”
“You refer, of course, to the news of my death,” he said. “But you survived the shock, as you call it, and—you are far more beautiful than I remembered you.”
He leaned forward and rested his head on his clasped hands, his eyes searching her face with smiling boldness.
“There are not many men,” he went on, “who come back from the grave the way I did to find—everything so unchanged.”
He sprang from his chair and paced the floor excitedly.
“If I’d only come yesterday!” he cried. “I had saved enough—I could have prevented that absurd fiasco.”