“Last night after dinner,” he began, “I went into the winter-garden to smoke a cigar. I had some business affairs which I wanted to put straight in my mind; and I thought I could stow myself away in a corner there and be free from interruption. So I sat down at one side of the winter-garden behind a large clump of palms where no one was likely to see me; and I began to think over the points I had in mind.”
“Yes?” prompted Sir Clinton, who seemed anxious to cut Foss’s narrative down to essentials.
“While I was sitting there,” the American continued, “some of the young people came into the winter-garden and sat down in a recess on the side opposite to where I was. At first they didn’t disturb me. I thought they’d be almost out of earshot, on the other side of the dome. I think you were one of them, Miss Chacewater: you, and your brother, and Miss Rainhill, and some one else whom I didn’t recognize.”
“I was there,” Joan confirmed, looking rather puzzled as to what might come next.
“You may not know, Miss Chacewater,” Foss continued, “that your winter-garden is a sort of whispering-gallery. Although I was quite a long way off from your party, your voices came quite clearly across to where I was sitting. They didn’t disturb me at all—I’ve got the knack of concentration when I’m thinking about business affairs. But although I wasn’t listening intentionally, the whole conversation was getting in at my ear while I was thinking about other things. I suppose I ought to have gone away or let you know I was there; but the fact is, I’d just got to a point where I was seeing my way through a rather knotty tangle, and I didn’t want to break my chain of thought. I wasn’t eavesdropping, you understand?”
“Yes?” repeated Sir Clinton, with a slight acidity in his tone. “And then?”
But the American failed to take the hint. Evidently he laid great stress on explaining exactly how things had fallen out.
“After a while,” he went on, with an evident effort to be accurate, “Miss Chacewater and some one else left the party.”
“Quite true,” Joan confirmed. “We went to play billiards.”
The American nodded.