le unsteady, but the mimicry of
his own drawling speech of former years held an echo of boyhood--a
twanging, boyish echo--which dragged at Caleb's very heartstrings.

"Haow--haow d'ye do, Uncle Cal?" he quavered.

Barbara had turned and started indoors in search of Miss Sarah. Now
she halted, her slim back toward the two men at the veranda's edge, and
stood motionless at the sound of that voice. When, little by little,
she faced around at last, it was fairly to feel those grave gray eyes
resting upon her own face. The blood of a sudden came storming up into
Barbara's cheeks. And Caleb, even if he did not know what all of the
girl's emotions were at that moment, knew that he knew one of them at
least. Caleb had just learned himself what it was to see a ghost.

Dexter Allison, coming up less airily across the lawn, surprised his
daughter poised with one hand outstretched, red lips half open. Ho
found her staring, velvet eyed and pink of face, at a tall figure in
blue flannel and corduroy, and although he had never seen him in all
the months that the latter had been in his employ, Allison knew this
must be the one in whose keeping lay, directly or indirectly, the
success or failure of the biggest thing he had ever attempted in this
north country--the man to whom he always referred, whenever he boasted
of his exploits, as "my man O'Mara."

Beyond that point, however, Allison's immediate recognition did not go.
The past interested him but little, except as a matter for precedent or
a record of past performances. But memory fairly clamored in the
girl's ears that morning. There was not one tiniest detail of the
strangely intense, sturdily confident little hill-boy's bearing but
what came back to her at that moment. She remembered them all, and
seconds later, when Steve's fingers had closed over her own
outstretched hand, she realized that she was staring at him in a
childishly concentrated effort to read again in the man's gaze the
undisguised worship and wonder which had always followed her from the
eyes of the boy who had fought to be her knight. And she realized
suddenly that he had sensed the effort behind her eager scrutiny, even
though his own eyes remained whimsically unreadable.

"I always told them that you would come back," she murmured then.
"Just as you--you said you would."

The remark was barely loud enough for even Steve to hear, but hard upon
its utterance she caught her breath in anger at hers