“Stop!” cried Wesley Elliot, with a gesture of loathing. “I can’t listen to you.”
“But you’ll marry her—eh?”
Bolton’s voice again dropped into a whining monotone. He even smiled deprecatingly.
“You’ll excuse my ranting a bit, sir. It’s natural after what I’ve gone through. You’ve never been in a prison, maybe. And you don’t know what it’s like to shake the bars of a cell at midnight and howl out of sheer madness to be off and away—somewhere, anywhere!”
He leaned forward and touched the minister on the knee.
“And that brings me back to my idea in coming to see you. I’m a level-headed man, still—quite cool and collected, as you see—and I’ve been thinking the situation over.”
He drew his brows together and stared hard at the minister.
“I’ve a proposition to make to you—as man to man. Can’t talk reason to a woman; there’s no reason in a woman’s make-up—just sentiment and affection and imagination: an impossible combination, when there are hard realities to face.... I see you don’t agree with me; but never mind that; just hear what I have to say.”
But he appeared in no haste to go on, for all the eagerness of his eyes and those pallid, restless hands. The minister got quickly to his feet. The situation was momentarily becoming intolerable; he must have time to think it over, he told himself, and determine his own relations to this new and unwelcome parishioner.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” he began; “but—”