There was something about the thing’s expression that absolutely chilled me, and I withdrew on tiptoe and shut the door. And, as I did so, I bumped into someone.
“Oh, sorry!” he said.
I spun round. It was the pink-faced chappie, Lord Something or other, the fellow I had met with Claude and Eustace.
“I say,” he said apologetically, “awfully sorry to bother you, but those weren’t my cats I met just now legging it downstairs, were they? They looked like my cats.”
“They came out of my bedroom.”
“Then they were my cats!” he said sadly. “Oh, dash it!”
“Did you put cats in my bedroom?”
“Your man, what’s-his-name, did. He rather decently said I could keep them there till my train went. I’d just come to fetch them. And now they’ve gone! Oh, well, it can’t be helped, I suppose. I’ll take the hat and the fish, anyway.”
I was beginning to dislike this chappie.
“Did you put that bally fish there, too?”
“No, that was Eustace’s. The hat was Claude’s.”
I sank limply into a chair.
“I say, you couldn’t explain this, could you?” I said. The chappie gazed at me in mild surprise.