“Did he take his hat?” Stapleton asked.
“No, he came out just as he was.”
“Then he cannot have left the theater. If you should see him will you tell him, please, that I have gone down to the foyer to find him?”
But La Planta was not in the foyer. Nor, apparently, was he anywhere else in the theater. Asked if a gentleman without a hat had gone out of the theater within the last half hour, the commissionaire replied that he had been absent a little while, so would not like to say.
La Planta had not returned to the box when Stapleton got back there, nor did he return at all. Jessica, told by Stapleton that the inquiry had been for her, looked at him oddly, but made no comment.
As usual, Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson—or as all her friends called her, Jessica—entertained her theater guests at supper at her house in Cavendish Square after the performance. Both she and Stapleton expected that La Planta would put in an appearance there, but he did not.
It was quite a big supper-party, for people kept arriving in cars until past one o’clock, so that when at last it came to an end, the guests grouped about the card tables in the room adjoining, playing “chemmy” and other games, numbered over thirty.
“What can have become of him?” Jessica said to Stapleton in an undertone as she drew him aside. “And without his hat, too. I can’t imagine where he can have gone, or who it can have been who inquired for me. Archie ought to have told me!”
“I have telephoned twice to the Albany, but can get no reply.”
“You wouldn’t, at this time of the night.”