"Yes," Walter assented.
"But when we have got well-established, we shall do famously. It is only to wait."
"Yes, only to wait," Walter repeated.
"And what is waiting, when you know it will come?" Ralph added.
"You are not in love," Walter remarked, so despondently that his friend broke out into a merry laugh.
"Glad to say I am not, Walter, except with my profession." Then he added, apologetically, "I beg your pardon, my dear fellow. I forgot that you are; but what has that to do with it?"
"Everything, when you talk so coolly about waiting. Look here, Ralph; before I came away here, I thought I wasn't far-off from being married to my cousin Sarah; and so I should have been by this time if it hadn't been for—well, never mind about that. But I sort of promised then that, at the end of two years, things should come straight for it. And now you talk about ten years!" This was said with a rueful countenance.
Ralph laughed again. "I did not say it must be ten years before you could be married, did I, Walter?"
"No; but putting this and that together, it doesn't seem—but there, why should I bother you with my troubles?"
If he did not bother his friend, poor Walter confided in him, and he was presently pouring into Ralph's sympathising understanding the tale of his griefs hitherto undivulged to his friend. The reader knows what these troubles were—some real, some fanciful—so we need not repeat them. They were foolish and trivial, no doubt. But who is without them? Or who would be without them if he could?