‘If you don’t mind, I don’t,’ said Denny reasonably.
‘That’s right. It’s only a little way Beatrice—’ I stopped abruptly. We were now on the steps outside the restaurant, and I had just perceived a scrap of paper lying on the mosaic pavement. I stooped down and picked it up. It proved to be a fragment torn from the menu card. I turned it over.
‘Hullo, what’s this?’ said I, searching for my eye-glass, which was (as usual) somewhere in the small of my back.
Denny gave me the glass, and I read what was written on the back. It was in Greek, and it ran thus:
‘By way of Rhodes—small yacht there—arrive seventh.’
I turned the piece of paper over in my hand. I drew a conclusion or two; one was that my tall neighbour was named Stefanopoulos; another that he had made good use of his ears—better than I had made of mine; for a third, I guessed that he would go to Neopalia; for a fourth, I fancied that Neopalia was the place to which the lady had declared she would accompany him. Then I fell to wondering why all these things should be so, why he wished to remember the route of my journey, the date of my arrival, and the fact that I meant to hire a yacht. Finally, those two chance encounters, taken with the rest, assumed a more interesting complexion.
‘When you’ve done with that bit of paper,’ observed Denny, in a tone expressive of exaggerated patience, ‘we might as well go on, old fellow.’
‘All right. I’ve done with it—for the present,’ said I. But I took the liberty of slipping Mr Constantine Stefanopoulos’s memorandum into my pocket.
The general result of the evening was to increase most distinctly my interest in Neopalia. I went to bed still thinking of my purchase, and I recollect that the last thing which came into my head before I went to sleep was, ‘What did she mean by pointing to the ring?’
Well, I found an answer to that later on.