“Certainly.”
“Are you as systematic and methodical concerning the stubs in your check-book as you are about the arrangement of your desk?”
“I am afraid not.”
“Now, go back to the time when you left the train at the Fells, on your way home from the banquet. You say you have no recollection that Orizaba was with you during the walk from the station to the house?”
“None whatever.”
“And yet you say that you stopped two or three times and indulged in soliloquies—held animated dialogues with the lamp-posts and the telegraph-poles, eh?”
“Oh, yes; there is no doubt of that.”
“When you reached the piazza and dropped into a chair there, are you sure that you were alone?”
“As sure as I am of anything at all. Everything is more or less hazy, you know.”
“But half an hour later, or thereabouts, when you went to your room, Orizaba was standing at your desk, which was open?”