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."