ad written it down, half-unconsciously, over and over
again.... There it was--_Wilchester_--Wilchester--Wilchester.

The reiteration had a peculiar interest for Stoner. He had never heard
Cotherstone nor Mallalieu mention Wilchester at any time since his first
coming into their office. The firm had no dealings with any firm at
Wilchester. Stoner, who dealt with all the Mallalieu & Cotherstone
correspondence, knew that during his five and a half years' clerkship,
he had never addressed a single letter to any one at Wilchester, never
received a single letter bearing the Wilchester post-mark. Wilchester
was four hundred miles away, far off in the south; ninety-nine out of
every hundred persons in Highmarket had never heard the name of
Wilchester. But Stoner had--quite apart from the history books, and the
geography books, and map of England. Stoner himself was a Darlington
man. He had a close friend, a bosom friend, at Darlington, named
Myler--David Myler. Now David Myler was a commercial traveller--a smart
fellow of Stoner's age. He was in the service of a Darlington firm of
agricultural implement makers, and his particular round lay in the
market-towns of the south and south-west of England. He spent a
considerable part of the year in those districts, and Wilchester was one
of his principal headquarters: Stoner had many a dozen letters of
Myler's, which Myler had written to him from Wilchester. And only a year
before all this, Myler had brought home a bride in the person of a
Wilchester girl, the daughter of a Wilchester tradesman.

So the name of Wilchester was familiar enough to Stoner. And now he
wanted to know what--what--what made it so familiar to Cotherstone that
Cotherstone absent-mindedly scribbled it all over a half-sheet of
foolscap paper?

But the figures? Had they any connexion with the word? This was the
question which Stoner put to himself when he sat down that night in his
parlour to seriously consider if he had any chance of winning that five
hundred pounds reward. He looked at the figures again--more carefully.
The truth was that until that evening he had never given much attention
to those figures: it was the word Wilchester that had fascinated him.
But now, summoning all his by no means small arithmetical knowledge to
his aid, Stoner concentrated himself on an effort to discover what
those figures meant. That they were a calculation of some sort he had
always known--now he wanted to know of what.