Bertha darted into the house and returned in a moment with a shabby brown coat that had a well-worn black velvet collar, and this she held out for his use.
“Most likely it is your own coat, the one which you left behind when you picked up the poor old man’s by mistake,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “At any rate, it is as much like the one in which I found the diamonds as it is possible for one coat to be like another.”
“Wait a moment, I will just run through the pockets before I put it on, in case there should be anything valuable there,” he said, taking the coat from her and feeling in all the pockets, turning out gloves, handkerchief, and a bulky woollen scarf.
“Oh, there is the old neck-wrap that I gave him that cold day when we were snowed up on the rail!” she cried, picking it up and holding it out for inspection.
“May I borrow that also?” Edgar held out his hand for it, and she gave it to him with a sudden sense of embarrassment not to be accounted for by any laws of reason or logic.
Even the touch of their hands as they met added to her unexplained confusion, and she was glad that it was so dark out on the veranda that he could not possibly see how violently she was blushing about nothing at all.
But was it nothing at all? Something like panic set up in Bertha’s heart as she went back into the house, where Eunice was still busy with the poor old man. It was of no use for her to try and blind herself to what that sudden confusion meant, and her fear was lest someone else should read on her face the very same tidings that her heart was telling her in such unmistakable language just then.
“Oh, I should die of shame if anyone were to guess that I cared for him!” she said to herself, with a little gasping sob, then she plunged into the confusion of things waiting to be done, and losing some of her miserable self-consciousness as she darted to and fro, clearing the table, putting the children to bed, and comforting Grace between whiles.
She dared not trust herself to think how she would manage to meet Edgar Bradgate when he came back with the doctor. She would have to thrust this new knowledge of her own heart far into the background, lest haply it should be seen by the very eyes from which she was most concerned to hide it.
Meanwhile Pucker was tearing along the lonely trail to Pentland Broads, with the wagon swaying and bumping in the rear.