“Since yesterday?” they repeated in one bewildered echo.
The stranger frowned.
“What is there strange about that?” he asked, irritably, impressed, nevertheless, by their evidently genuine astonishment.
“Where—where were you yesterday, Harry?” asked the young woman unsteadily, as though scarcely daring to probe some awful mystery.
He laughed shortly in impatience.
“Why, of course——” he began in confident tones. He stopped, a baffled look suddenly in his eyes. “Of course——” he began again, less confidently. Then he gave it up. “I—I can’t remember—it’s funny!—I can’t remember where I was yesterday——” He bit his lower lip, looked around him slowly with bent and puzzled brows, plainly uneasy at this unexpected forgetfulness. “But of course I must have been here!” He put an end to his embarrassment by dogmatic assertion.
Satterthwaite contemplated him for a moment with eyes that searched him to the depths.
“H’m!” he said, meditatively. “There’s something extraordinary about this!—Won’t you sit down, Mr. Tremaine?” He pointed to a chair. “Let us discuss this matter amicably—it’s not so simple as you think, and hostility won’t help us.”
Tremaine hesitated a moment, a flicker of angry revolt in his eyes. But there was a note in Satterthwaite’s quiet tones which more than invited compliance, and he seated himself in the chair with a shrug of the shoulders which justified him in himself.
“This is my flat—and my wife,” he said, “anyway!” The assertion sounded curiously weak.