“Yes.” She pointed to his shoulder.
He glanced down at his coat, but he felt the check. Surely the ways of women were strange, their manner of taking things past finding out. He explained, but he could not hide his chagrin. “I wasn’t thinking, and took the first that came to hand,” he said—“an old one. Does it matter?”
But she continued to stare at it. He was wearing a riding coat, high in the collar, long in the skirts, shaped to the figure. On the light buff of the cloth a stain spread downwards from shoulder to breast. The right arm and cuff, too, were discolored, and it said much for the disorder of his thoughts that he had ridden from town without noticing it. She eyed the stain with distaste, with something like a shudder. “It is blood,” she said, “isn’t it?”
He shrugged his shoulders, yet himself viewed it askance. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t know how you knew. I wore it that night, you know. I did not mean to wear it again, but in my hurry——”
“Do you mean the night that my father was hurt?”
“Yes.”
“You held him up in the carriage?”
“Yes, but—” squinting at it—“I don’t think that it was done then. I believe it was done when I was picking him up in the road, Jos, before Bourdillon came. Indeed, I remember that your father noticed it—before he fainted, you know.”
“My father noticed it?”
“Well, oddly enough, he did.”