And he did not. As the sunlight faded from the room the old man's breathing became slower and ceased.
Marrion stood looking down on him for a moment before she called for aid. All the time she had been watching she had been thinking, thinking; but she had arrived at nothing. Only deep down in her was a glad feeling of inheritance--a consciousness that the dead man had given her something, something that she held in trust.
Was it only the gold snuff-box, she wondered vaguely, as, back in her own tent, she touched the spring.
"The bearer of this, Prince Paul Pauloffski----" She sat staring at the words.
Prince Paul Pauloffski was her father. Then she was gentle born. Then she need not--
With a rush all the things she need not have done crushed in on her. She buried her face in the pillow as she sat on the edge of her bed and muttered--
"People who play Providence!"
Of a truth the wise man with the strange eyes was right. Your past was karma. You could not escape from it.
After a time she sat up and began to decipher the rest. It was in French, the lingua franca of Eastern diplomacy. Noble-born, poor, devoted, daring. That was the essence of the credentials. The other paper simply gave the address of the ancestral home and that of two sons in the army. A memorandum as to keys and papers filled up the back of the latter. She replaced them, shut down the spring again, then, remembering she could show no right to the snuff-box for which inquiry was sure to be made, took them out again. Nothing, somehow, seemed to matter now. She had made her mistake, she must suffer.
"You have all you want?" asked Doctor Forsyth, as she handed him the box, and she flushed scarlet. Sometimes he seemed to her too clever--he found out everything, everything!