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?"
They discussed Bones in terms equally unflattering. They likened Bones to all representatives of the animal world whose characteristics are extreme foolishness, but at last they came into a saner, calmer frame of mind.
Miss Clara Stegg seated herself on the frowsy sofa—indispensable to a Pimlico furnished flat—and, with her elbow on one palm and her chin on another, reviewed the situation. She was the brains of a little combination which had done so much to distress and annoy susceptible financiers in the City of London. (The record of the Stegg sisters may be read by the curious, or, at any rate, by as many of the curious as have the entrée to the Record Department of Scotland Yard.)