“Their truest, best friend, I hope.”
“You call yourself my friend,” continued Sir Gordon, in the same angry, unreasoning way, “and yet you give them that letter? You should have sent it back to the scoundrel, marked dead. They are dead to him. Bayle, you were a fool.”
“Do you think so?” he said smiling, and looking round at his companion. “My dear sir, is your Christianity at so low an ebb that you speak those words?”
“Now you are beginning to preach, sir, to excuse yourself.”
“No,” replied Bayle quietly. “I was only about to say, suppose these long years of suffering for his crime have changed the man; are we to say there is to be no ray of hope in his darkened life?”
“I can’t argue with you, Bayle,” cried Sir Gordon. “Forgive me. I grow old and easily excited. I called you a fool: I was the fool. It was misplaced. You are not very angry with me?”
“My dear old friend!”
“My dear boy!”
Sir Gordon’s voice sounded strange, and something wonderfully like a sob was heard. Then, for some time they paced on round and round the square, glancing at the illumined window-blind, both longing to be back in the pleasant little room.
And now the same feeling that had troubled Bayle seemed to have made its way into Sir Gordon’s breast. The little home, with its tokens of feminine taste and traces of mother and daughter everywhere, had grown to be so delightful an oasis in his desert life that he looked with dismay at the chance of losing it for ever.