"My dear old typewriter!" gasped Bones. "My dear old miss! Confound it all! Hang it all, I say! Dear old thing!"
"Miss," murmured Bones from force of habit. Even in his agitation he could not resist the temptation to interrupt.
"You can leave this picture, Miss Stegg," said the girl coolly. "Mr. Tibbetts wants to add it to his collection."
She had risen to her feet, her eyes fixed on the girl's face, and, with no word of protest or explanation, she turned and walked swiftly from the office. Hamilton opened the door, noting the temporary suspension of the undulatory motion.
When she had gone, they looked at one another, or, rather, they looked at the girl, who, for her part, was examining the photograph. She took a little knife from the desk before Bones and inserted it into the thick cardboard mount, and ripped off one of the layers of cardboard. And so Bones's photograph was exposed, shorn of all mounting. But, what was more important, beneath his photograph was a cheque on the Third National Bank, which was a blank cheque and bearing Bones's undeniable signature in the bottom right-hand corner--the signature was decipherable through the smudge.
"Most curious thing I've ever seen in my life, dear old typewriter," he said. "Why, that's the very banking establishment I patronise."
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."