Bones stared.
"Most curious thing I've ever seen in my life, dear old typewriter," he
said. "Why, that's the very banking establishment I patronise."
"I thought it might be," said the girl.
And then it dawned upon Bones, and he gasped.
"Great Moses!" he howled--there is no prettier word for it. "That
naughty, naughty, Miss Thing-a-me-jig was making me sign a blank
cheque! My autograph! My sacred aunt! Autograph on a cheque..."
Bones babbled on as the real villainy of the attempt upon his finances
gradually unfolded before his excited vision.
Explanations were to follow. The girl had seen a paragraph warning
people against giving their autographs, and the police had even
circulated a rough description of two "well-dressed women" who, on one
pretext or another, were securing from the wealthy, but the unwise,
specimens of their signatures.
"My young and artful typewriter," said Bones, speaking with emotion,
"you have probably saved 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?"