"I can't find him anywhere."
She was evidently making a night of it. I sighed and sat down in a chair.
"I don't quite see the reason for your agitation," I said patiently.
"My dream"
"That curry we had for dinner!"
"Oh, Sir Eustace!"
The woman was quite indignant. And yet everybody knows that nightmares are a direct result of injudicious eating.
"After all," I continued persuasively, "why shouldn't Anne Beddingfeld and Race go out for a little stroll without having the whole hotel aroused about it?"
"You think they've just gone out for a stroll together? But it's after midnight!"
"One does these foolish things when one is young," I murmured, "though Race is certainly old enough to know better."
"Do you really think so?"
"I dare say they've run away to make a match of it," I continued soothingly, though fully aware that I was making an idiotic suggestion. For, after all, at a place like this, where is there to run away to?
I don't know how much longer I should have gone on making feeble remarks, but at that moment Race himself walked in upon us. At any rate, I had been partly right—he had been out for a stroll, but he hadn't taken Anne with him. However, I had been quite wrong in my way of dealing with the situation. I was soon shown that. Race had the whole hotel turned upside-down in three minutes. I've never seen a man more upset.
The thing is very extraordinary. Where did the girl go? She walked out of the hotel, fully dressed, about ten minutes past eleven, and she was never seen again. The
