me from utter ruin, dear old thing. Goodness
only knows what might have happened, or where I might have been
sleeping to-night, my jolly old Salvationist, if your beady little eye
hadn't penetrated like a corkscrew through the back of that naughty old
lady's neck and read her evil intentions."

"I don't think it was a matter of my beady eye," said the girl, without
any great enthusiasm for the description, "as my memory."

"I can't understand it," said Bones, puzzled. "She came in a beautiful
car----"

"Hired for two hours for twenty-five shillings," said the girl.

"But she was so beautifully dressed. She had a chinchilla coat----"

"Imitation beaver," said Miss Marguerite Whitland, who had few
illusions. "You can get them for fifteen pounds at any of the West End
shops."

It was a very angry Miss Bertha Stegg who made her way in some haste to
Pimlico. She shared a first-floor suite with a sister, and she burst
unceremoniously into her relative's presence, and the elder Miss Stegg
looked round with some evidence of alarm.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

She was a tall, bony woman, with a hard, tired face, and lacked most of
her sister's facial charm.

"Turned down," said Bertha briefly. "I had the thing signed, and then
a----" (one omits the description she gave of Miss Marguerite Whitland,
which was uncharitable) "smudged the thing with her fingers."

"She tumbled to it, eh?" said Clara. "Has she put the splits on you?"

"I shouldn't think so," said Bertha, throwing off her coat and her hat,
and patting her hair. "I got away too quickly, and I came on by the
car."

"Will he report it to the police?"

"He's not that kind. Doesn't it make you mad, Clara, to think that
that fool has a million to spend? Do you know what he's done? Made
perhaps a hundred thousand pounds in a couple of days! Wouldn't that
rile you?"

They discussed Bones in terms equally unflattering. They likened Bones
to all representatives of the animal world whose characteristics are
extreme foolishness, but at last they came into a saner, calmer frame
of mind.

Miss Clara Stegg seated herself on the frowsy sofa--indispensable to a
Pimlico furnished flat--and, with her elbow on one palm and her chin on
another, reviewed the situation. She was the brains of a little
combination which had done so much to distress and annoy susceptible
financiers in the City of London. (The record of the Stegg sisters may
be read by the cur