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Jonah was speaking.

"They've five and a quarter hours' start. Why give them six? If you girls will get to bed, we'll send for a manager first and then for the police."

This counsel was common sense, and, since our rooms were en suite, it was easy enough to persuade my sister and wife and cousin to make themselves scarce. Five minutes later a manager came to the room.

The scenes which followed may as well be imagined as set down. Managers, porters, waiters and plain-clothes men came and went and were summoned and dismissed and reappeared until I felt that I was moving upon some fantastic screen. The telephone was used and abused: statements were taken right and left: all manner of orders were issued, and if I described the Plazas, I described them a hundred times. Casca de Palk sat by the open window, cleansed but collarless, continually reviling all 'treachers', arguing explosively with the detectives and calling God to witness that the shooting pains in his head were not to be borne. Piers and Jonah and I did what we could to compile an exhaustive list of the property gone--by no means a simple task, for, as was to be expected, the Plazas had been through the bedrooms before they left, and the effort to recollect possessions which were no longer there to speak for themselves, called for a concentration which no one was fit to afford. Berry, wearing orange-coloured pyjamas and a green felt hat of Daphne's which he had made sopping wet, strolled to and fro, smoking, now goading de Palk to frenzy by some idiotic advice, now criticizing our description of some of the stolen goods, and now confusing the detectives by deliberately referring to the Plazas as 'the Count and Countess de Palk'. The effect of these 'mistakes' upon Casca will go into no words that I know, and though in the end even Jonah threw in his hand and laughed till he cried, such devilry was inconvenient and at last Piers and I intervened and fairly drove its author out of the room.