“I’ve invited Frank to lunch. I told them you were coming. Frank has something important to tell you, he said.”
“Did he tell you what?”
“No. At least it had reference, he said, to the Château d’Uzerche, or to something that has been found there. To tell the truth, I was thinking of something else when he told me.”
“Dearest,” I said, some minutes later, my arm about her waist, “you remember my telling you I had taken a few of the coins I found in your father’s house. Well, yesterday I had them tested. They are not counterfeits. They are genuine.”
She looked at me curiously. Then, after a pause, she said—
“What made you think they might be counterfeit?”
“What made me think so? Seeing that I discovered with them a number of implements, etc, used apparently in the manufacture of base coin, my inference naturally was that the coins must have been false.”
Still she looked at me. Gradually her expression hardened.
“Dick,” she said at last, “you are deceiving me. You have deceived me all along. You told me you knew my father’s secret. Now you don’t know it—do you?”
“Indeed you are mistaken, quite mistaken, dearest,” I exclaimed quickly. “I know it well enough, but I don’t, I admit, know that part of it which bears upon these coins. I never pretended to know that part.”