morrow afternoon at the corner of Oxford Street and Regent
Street."

"What time!" asked the other.

"Six o'clock," said the first man. "The chap who takes the money must
carry a copy of the Westminster Gazette in his hand."

"Oh, then it's a plant," said the other with conviction.

The other laughed.

"She won't work any plants. I bet she's scared out of her life."

The second man bit his nails and looked up and down the road,
apprehensively.

"It's come to something," he said bitterly; "we went out to make our
thousands and we've come down to 'chanting' for 20 pounds."

"It's the luck," said the other philosophically, "and I haven't done
with her by any means. Besides we've still got a chance of pulling of
the big thing, Harry. I reckon she's good for a hundred or two, anyway."

At six o'clock on the following afternoon, a man dressed in a dark
overcoat, with a soft felt hat pulled down over his eyes stood
nonchalantly by the curb near where the buses stop at Regent Street
slapping his hand gently with a folded copy of the Westminster Gazette.

That none should mistake his Liberal reading, he stood as near as
possible to a street lamp and so arranged himself and his attitude that
the minimum of light should fall upon his face and the maximum upon
that respectable organ of public opinion. Soon after six he saw the girl
approaching, out of the tail of his eye, and strolled off to meet her.
To his surprise she passed him by and he was turning to follow when an
unfriendly hand gripped him by the arm.

"Mr. Fisher, I believe," said a pleasant voice.

"What do you mean?" said the man, struggling backward.

"Are you going quietly!" asked the pleasant Superintendent Mansus, "or
shall I take my stick to you'?"

Mr. Fisher thought awhile.

"It's a cop," he confessed, and allowed himself to be hustled into the
waiting cab.

He made his appearance in T. X.'s office and that urbane gentleman
greeted him as a friend.

"And how's Mr. Fisher!" he asked; "I suppose you are Mr. Fisher still
and not Mr. Harry Gilcott, or Mr. George Porten."

Fisher smiled his old, deferential, deprecating smile.

"You will always have your joke, sir. I suppose the young lady gave me
away."

"You gave yourself away, my poor Fisher," said T. X., and put a strip
of paper before him; "you may disguise your hand, and in your extreme
modesty pretend to an ignorance of the British language, which is
not creditable to your many attainme