"What have my private affairs to do with you?"
"Your private affairs? It has come to that! You call attempted murder your private affair? Do you deny that you did strike Draycott as he says?"
"I deny everything."
"I see--a general denial. You know, Dodwell, you should have started denying at the first. When you tacitly admit that you did meet Draycott, and that you did quarrel with him, you have already reached the point at which a general denial only tells against you. What I don't understand, Draycott, is, where have you been since that night? I don't know if you are aware that the British public has been taking a most lively interest in your private affairs, and that all sorts of more or less interested persons have been searching for you high and low. It's a good time ago, you know, since the Easter ball. The puzzle is, in what unfindable place have you been hidden all this while?"
"I've been with Beaton."
"You've been--where? Pardon me, Miss Forster, you were going to speak."
"I--I was only going to ask him what he meant by--by saying that he has been with Mr. Beaton."
"It is not altogether easy to explain; you will get a fuller explanation from someone else; I can only tell you what I know. The last thing I remembered at Avonham was, as I have told you, that Dodwell was beating me about the head with a club as I lay on the floor."
"You delightful person, Mr. Dodwell." The interruption came from Frank Clifford. "Mixed up with it was the feeling that Beaton was in the room. Then, I suppose, I lost consciousness. When I came to myself again I couldn't make out what had happened, or where I was. Then by degrees I began to understand that I was in bed, in a strange room, and that Beaton was leaning over me. 'Why, Syd!' I said--it wasn't a very brilliant remark to make, but I remember that I did make it. What he said I don't know, I fancy I must have slipped back into unconsciousness again. To make a long story short, when I did come really to myself again, I found that I was in Beaton's rooms."
"But how on earth did you get there?" demanded Major Reith. "When I last saw you I could have sworn that you were lying dead on the floor of that room at Avonham. Directly my back was turned, did you get up and walk to Beaton's rooms?"