Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/48

38 quiet hotel in a neighbourhood of the Strand, convenient both for sight-seeing and my business, I had my luggage conveyed thither, and prepared to make myself comfortable for a time. Every day I waited eagerly for a letter from my sweetheart, but its non-arrival convinced me that they had not yet arrived in London. As it turned out later, they had delayed their departure from Naples for two days, and had spent another three in Florence, two in Rome, and a day and a half in Paris.

But one morning my faithful watch over the letter rack, which was already becoming a standing joke in the hotel, was rewarded. An envelope bearing an English stamp and postmark, and addressed in a handwriting that was as familiar to me as my own, stared me in the face. To take it out and break the seal was the work of a moment. It was only a matter of a few lines, but it brought me news that raised me to the seventh heaven of delight.

They had arrived in London the previous afternoon, were staying at the Hôtel Métropole, would leave town for the country at the end of the week, but in the meantime, if I wished to see her, my sweetheart would be in the entrance hall of the British Museum the following morning at eleven o'clock.

How I conducted myself in the interval between my receipt of the letter and the time of the appointment, I have not the least remembrance; I only know that half-past ten, on the following morning, found me pacing up and down the street before that venerable pile, scanning with eager eyes every conveyance that approached me from the right or left. The minutes seemed to drag by with a slowness I had never before observed in them, but at length the time arrived.