“Oh, my Lord, if thou wilt grant me so great a good as to win her for my wife, if thou wilt bless me in seeking her, if it is according to thy will that our lives should be united, and that together we should carry the cross of Christ to the lost, grant me, O Lord, a sign. But if it be not thy will, make this, too, known to me. Thy will I seek, O my God, in this, in all things.”
Then, being wearied in brain and body, he slept heavily until morning.
When, just before the breakfast hour, Keith stepped into the hall, he paused a moment, hearing a step on the stairs above him leading from the third story rooms. He advanced slowly to the head of the next staircase, and not until he reached it did he see who it was descending from above. Then, lifting his eyes, he saw Anna Mallison.
Her presence in this house, at this hour, so surprising, so unlooked-for, so almost unnatural, since her home was elsewhere in the city—what did it mean? It was the sign he had craved. How else could he interpret it?
The blood rushed in sudden flow to his heart, leaving his face colourless.
Anna, not being surprised to meet him thus, was simply saying “Good morning,” and passing down the stairs. Keith put out his hand and stopped her going.
So marvellous did her presence seem to him that he forthwith spoke out with unconventional directness the thought in his mind.
“I think you do not know just what it means that you are here, in this house, this morning.”
Mally Loveland would have flashed some pert rejoinder to a comment like this; Gertrude Ingraham, in a similar situation, would have looked at Keith Burgess with pretty wonder and smiling question.
Anna Mallison, seeing the pallor and emotion of his face, and having become wonted to the supernatural interpretation of the small events of human life, only said gravely and without obvious surprise:—