Stratton did not reply for a few moments. Then, in a low voice, full of emotion:
“Percy, lad, you must bear with me: it is all too deep for words. If we could change places you would do as I do. Speak to her? pray to her? Have I not done all this till now when her eyes gaze in mine with their gentle, pleading calm, and say to me—‘Bear with me; be patient. If you love me, give me time till all these sorrows of the past have grown blurred and faint with distance.’ Guest, old fellow, she gives me no hope. There is no verbal promise, but there is a something in her gentle, compassionate look which says to me—‘Wait; if ever I can forget the past—if ever I marry man—it will be you.’”
There was a deep silence in the room, and faintly heard came the roar of the great city street.
Stratton was the first to break the silence by saying softly to himself:
“Yes; wait: the time will come.” Again the silence was broken, this time by a strange hurrying, rustling sound behind the wainscot, followed by a dull thud.
“What’s that?” said Guest sharply. “That? Oh, only the rats. There are plenty in this old house.”
“Ugh! Brutes.”
“They only have runs behind the panelling. They never come into the rooms.”
There was another silence before Guest spoke. “Mal, old chap,” he said, “I’m a miserable, impatient beast. You are quite right; I’m in my ordinary senses once more. Edie speaks just as you do, and she’s as wise a little thing as ever stepped. We must wait, old man; we must wait.”
Malcolm Stratton waited till one evening, when fortune favoured him for the moment once again. It was by accident that he found Myra alone. He had heard the tones of the piano as he went up to the drawing room in Bourne Square, and his heart had begun to beat wildly and then its pulsations grew to throbs and bounds, as he went in, to find her alone and playing softly in the half light.