her.”
“Had a quarrel, you mean?”
“No, I don’t mean we had a quarrel. I mean I literally lost her. The last I ever saw of her was in the Customs sheds at New York.
We were behind a pile of trunks, and I had just asked her to be my wife, and she had just said she would and everything was perfectly splendid, when a most offensive blighter in a peaked cap came up to talk about some cigarettes which he had found at the bottom of my trunk and which I had forgotten to declare.
It was getting pretty late by then, for we hadn’t docked till about ten-thirty, so I told Mabel to go on to her hotel and I would come round next day and take her to lunch. And since then I haven’t set eyes on her.”
“You mean she wasn’t at the hotel?”
“Probably she was. But—”
“You don’t mean you never turned up?”
“Bertie, old man,” said Biffy, in an overwrought kind of way, “for Heaven’s sake don’t keep trying to tell me what I mean and what I don’t mean! Let me tell this my own way, or I shall get all mixed up and have to go back to the beginning.”
“Tell it your own way,” I said, hastily.
“Well, then, to put it in a word, Bertie, I forgot the name of the hotel. By the time I’d done half an hour’s heavy explaining about those cigarettes my