"If you show them it is what you came for the count who will certainly hear of it will want to get it. What would happen if he knew you had given it to me?"
"Why think of that now?" she returned. But he noticed that a shade of fear passed over her face at the thought of it.
"If you get it and put it in the tool box he will only think how well you have served his interests in coat hunting while his lazy varlets were abed. Of course if they don't hand it to you at the farm and it isn't in the coat it may be destroyed. I'm afraid you'll have to do some bullying and threatening to get at the truth but the truth I must have."
She rose from the rush bottomed chair with a sigh.
"You believe that there are those who can read fate?"
Anthony Trent hesitated. Men of his profession were usually superstitious attaching unwarranted importance to fortuitous things, watching for signs and portents and abandoning planned enterprises at times because of some sign of misfortune which had met them.
"I don't believe it," he admitted, "but that sort of thing influences me. Why?"
"There is a woman nearby who can tell," Pauline replied, "Yesterday I gave her money. She said—can you think of it—that I should die happy."
"I hope you do," he said.