The explanation was as simple as possible.  Jenny had first fetched a book for her mistress from the library, before the house-party left for the ball.  She then had supper and went to Mrs. Croyle’s room.  It was then about half-past nine, so far as she could conjecture.  Her mistress, however, was not ready for bed, and dismissed Jenny, saying that she would look after herself.  Jenny thereupon retired to her own bedroom and wrote a letter.  After writing it, she remembered that she had not put out the distilled water which Mrs. Croyle was in the habit of using for her toilet.  She accordingly returned to Mrs. Croyle’s bedroom, and to her surprise found it empty.  She waited for a quarter of an hour, and then becoming uneasy, went downstairs into the hall.  She heard her mistress and some one else talking in the library.  Their voices were raised a little as though they were quarrelling.

“Quarrelling!” Sir Chichester Splay cried out the word in dismay.  His hand flapped feebly on the table.  “I am afraid to go on....  What do you think, Hillyard?  I am afraid to go on....”

“We must go on,” said Luttrell quietly.  He was very white.  Did he guess what was coming, Hillyard wondered?  At all events he did not falter.  He took the business of putting questions altogether out of his host’s hands.

“Was the somebody a man or a woman?”

“A woman, sir.”

“Did you recognise her voice?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who was it?”

“Miss Whitworth.”

Harry Luttrell nodded his head as if he had, during these last minutes, come to expect that answer and no other.  But Sir Chichester rose up in wrath and, leaning forward over the table, shook his finger threateningly at the girl.

“Now you know you are not speaking the truth.  Miss Whitworth was at Harrel last night with the rest of us.”

“Yes, sir, but she came back to Rackham Park almost at once,” said Jenny; and Harry Luttrell’s face showed a sign of anxiety.  After all, he hadn’t seen Joan himself in the ball-room until well after ten o’clock.  “I should have known that it was Miss Whitworth even if I had not heard her voice,” and Jenny described how, on fetching Mrs. Croyle’s book, she had seen Joan unlatch the glass door of the library.

Sir Chichester was shaken, but he pushed his blotting-paper here and his pen there, and pished and tushed like a refractory child.

“And how did she get back?  I suppose she ran all the way in her satin shoes and back again, eh?”

“No, sir, she came back in Mrs. Brown’s motor-car.  I saw it from my bedroom window waiting in the drive.”

“Ah!  Now that we can put to the test, Jenny,” cried Sir Chichester triumphantly.  “And we will——­” He caught Hillyard’s eye as he moved towards the door in order to summon Miranda from the garden.  Hillyard warned him with an almost imperceptible shake of the head.  “Yes, we will, in our own time,” he concluded lamely.  His anger burst out again.  “Joan, indeed!  We won’t have her mixed up in this sordid business, it’s bad enough as it is.  But Joan, no!  To suggest that Joan came straight back from the Willoughbys’ dance in order to quarrel with a woman whom she was seeing every day here, and, having quarrelled with her, afterwards——­No, I won’t speak the word.  It’s preposterous!”