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.