Cheviot stood up, too. “On your honor, Hildegarde—” Was it the moonlight blanched her, or was she indeed so white? His heart smote him—but, “On your honor can you deny it?” he demanded.
“No,” she said, with sudden passion; “I don’t deny it.” And while her words should have steeled him, her voice brought a lump to his throat.
“You mean,” he asked, huskily, “to wait till John Galbraith comes back?”
“I know it’s quite mad—but there! A thing can take you like that. You can’t change.”
CHAPTER VIII
With the precision of clockwork, every day of his life but Sundays, Nathaniel Mar walked down the main street of Valdivia to the bank. People who lived out of sight of the City Hall timepiece, set their watches by the appearance of the lame man with the stick. He never varied the route, any more than he altered his time, and both had been exactly the same for twenty-eight years.
The other bank cashiers (few of them over thirty) said that, in their opinion, Mr. Mar had hung on quite long enough. They did not hesitate to add that his post would have fallen to a younger man years ago had Mar not been “a sort of relation.” Even so it was pretty steep that an old codger of sixty should be blocking up the way like that. A bank was no place for the superannuated, unless, of course, a man was a director.