“I think so,” he said, quietly.
“Trusting to my common-sense as a business man not to be fool enough to cut my own throat by cutting yours?” I persisted.
“Exactly, and trusting to a few other circumstances, the details of which I beg permission to keep to myself,” he said, with a faint sneer.
He rose and walked to the window; at the same moment I heard the sound of wheels below.
“I believe that is our carriage,” he said. “Are you ready to start, Mr. Scarlett?”
“Now?” I exclaimed.
“Why not? I’m not in the habit of dawdling over anything. Come, sir, there is nothing very serious the matter with you, is there?”
I said nothing; he knew, of course, the exact state of the wound I had received, that the superficial injury was of no account, that the shock had left me sound as a silver franc though a trifle weak in the hips and knees.
“Is the Countess de Vassart to go with us?” I asked, trying to find a reason for these events which were succeeding one another too quickly to suit me.
He gave me an absent-minded nod; a moment later the Countess entered. She had mended her black 122 crêpe gown where I tore it when I hung in the shadow of death under the battlements of La Trappe. She wore black gloves, a trifle shabby, and carried a worn satchel in her hands.