



Produced by Victorian/Edwardian Pictorial Magazines,
Jonathan Ingram, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net







THE

STRAND MAGAZINE

_An Illustrated Monthly_

Vol. 5, Issue. 29.

May 1893

[Illustration: "EXCUSE OUR INTRUSION, MADAM."

(_In the Shadow of the Sierras._)]




IN THE SHADOW OF THE SIERRAS

BY IZA DUFFUS HARDY.


Barbara Thorne sat leaning her head on her hand, looking at a photograph
that lay on the table beneath her eyes. She had not intended to look for
_that_ when she pulled out a dusty drawer full of old letters, papers,
and account-books to arrange and set in order. But when in the course of
her rummaging and tidying she found that picture in her hand, she paused
in her task. The neglected drawer stood open, with its dusty packets and
rolls of faded papers. Barbara had forgotten it and all else around her.

She sat there lost in memory, her eyes fixed upon the "counterfeit
presentment" of the face that once had been all the world to her. She
did not often think of Oliver Desmond now; to think of him meant only
pain--pain of outraged pride and wounded love. She had outgrown the time
when she could not tear her thoughts from him, when his face was in her
"mind's eye" by night and day, and yet she shrank with a shuddering
revolt of anguish from those pictures of the past which she could not
