“How could I?” she demanded, with a spirited lift of her head. “I asked you for help before and you refused.”
He looked at her with piercing keenness.
“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——”