“It seems so to you, beyond a doubt,” Peter replied. “Still, you have to do with a remarkably clever young man in the Count von Hern. I don’t want to ask you any questions you feel I ought not to, but I do wish you’d tell me one thing.”
“Go right ahead,” Mr. Heseltine-Wrigge invited. “Don’t be shy.”
“What day are you concluding this affair?”
Mr. Heseltine-Wrigge scratched his chin for a moment thoughtfully and glanced at his diary. “Well, I’ll risk that,” he decided. “A week to-day I hand over the coin.”
Peter drew a little breath of relief. A week was an immense time! He rose to his feet.
“That ends our business, then, for the present,” he said. “Now I am going to ask both of you a favor. Perhaps I have no right to, but as a man of honor, Mr. Heseltine-Wrigge, you can take it from me that I ask it in your interests as well as my own. Don’t tell the Count von Hern of my visit to you.”
Mr. Heseltine-Wrigge held out his hand.
“That’s all right,” he declared. “You hear, Myra?”
“I’ll be dumb, Baron,” she promised. “Say, when do you think Vi can come and see me?”
Peter was guilty of snobbery. He considered it quite a justifiable weapon.