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Madeleine glanced at the office clock.

“Two hours late,” she remarked, grimly. “How much longer do we go on before we do something?”

“And what do we do when we do it?” added Jerry.

Fingleton cleared his throat. When he had been out of a conversation for some while he always cleared his throat before re-entering it. Smith called it his signature tune.

“Mr. Bloggs has been late before,” he mentioned. “We must remember that.”

“Yes, he was so late on Wednesday that he never turned up at all,” retorted Madeleine, “and yesterday he was here for just forty-five minutes—which, in my humble opinion, was forty-five minutes too long!”

She tossed her dark head. Jerry Haines looked at her with a slight frown.

“Is that a generalisation,” he asked, “or did something happen during the forty-five minutes to cause the opinion?”

Tonsil stopped drawing rather rude cupids in the Stamp book. He recalled having seen the pretty secretary emerge from the Chief’s private sanctum with a high colour.

“If you would all like to know,” she answered, “I boxed our dear boss’s ears.”

“Dear me!” blinked Fingleton.

“Lummy, miss, wot for?” asked Tonsil.

“I don’t think we need worry Miss Trent for particulars,” said Jerry, quickly.

Madeleine gave a short laugh.

“It wouldn’t worry me in the least,” she replied, “only I shouldn’t think they were necessary. What do girls generally box men’s ears for?”

“Cave—’e’s comin’!” warned Tonsil, glancing towards the door.

Fingleton cleared his throat again. The operation was not merely his signature tune, but also his method of applying the closure. In silence they listened to ascending footsteps. But when the door opened it was Timothy O’Hara who saw them relax from their stiffened attitudes. His mood was so buoyant that he did not notice the heavy atmosphere he had walked into. He had been on the road a week, which represented half the firm’s active existence.

“Well, and how’s business?” he exclaimed. “Have ye all had your salaries doubled yet? I’ll be havin’ mine, though faith that won’t cost the firm much for at the moment ’tis nothing! Chief in there?”

He jerked his head towards the door of Mr. Bloggs’s office.

“No, he is not,” answered Madeleine.

“Ah, that explains why ye are sittin’ on the table swingin’ your legs!” laughed O’Hara. “ ’Tis busy ye all look, I’ll be sayin’! Is this all ye do while I’m sweatin’ round the country gettin’ business for ye? Out, eh? When d’ye expect him back?”

“We don’t expect him back,” said Madeleine. “He hasn’t arrived yet, and one can’t come back till one’s been.”

“Not arrived, is it?”

“Yesterday he was here for three-quarters of an hour, and the day before he didn’t come at all.”

“In fact,” added Jerry, “this morning we haven’t a very high opinion of our Mr. Bloggs.”

“Ah, well, I expect he’s just been waitin’ for me to start the ball rollin’,” said the Irishman, with a wink. “I’ve baited the ground in four counties, and I’ve interested ninety-five people who didn’t know what I was talkin’ about any more than I knew myself, but who agreed that it sounded grand! Now all we need are the goods, and we’ll get goin’.”

“Yes—exactly,” murmured Jerry, dryly.

Fingleton rubbed his nose thoughtfully, and looked a little pained. He was old-fashioned, and felt rather at sea with new methods of conducting business.

“You must have been somewhat handicapped, Mr. O’Hara, without any samples,” he remarked.

“ ’Tis true, I was,” admitted O’Hara, “and it takes an Irishman to talk successfully on nothing at all. But that’s what I’m wantin’ to talk to Bloggs about. I hope he won’t be long.”

“So do we, Mr. O’Hara,” said Madeleine. “It’s pay day.”

“Yus, and so it was last Friday,” chimed in Tonsil, “but I didn’t get nothink!”

“Now, then, my boy!” exclaimed Fingleton, admonishingly.

O’Hara raised his eyebrows, and glanced enquiringly at the assistant manager.

“We were none of us paid,” explained Jerry, “and we agreed to the postponement because—well, it was only a postponement. Something about—what was it?—delay in the procedure of starting the banking account.”

“On the wireless they call it a technical hitch,” said Madeleine.

A chilly little silence followed her remark, and the atmosphere which had been temporarily lightened by the Irishman’s buoyant entrance began deteriorating again.

“Bloggs promised I should have some stuff when I go out again on Monday,” said O’Hara. “Any sign of it?”

“Nothing has arrived here,” answered Fingleton.

“You handle the correspondence, Miss Trent?”

“There have been three letters to firms containing vague orders,” replied Madeleine. “When I say vague, I mean the goods ordered weren’t specified. They were called just goods, but the value ran into hundreds. Mr. Bloggs told me, when I ventured to ask a question, that these letters were follow-ups of previous business begun by him over the telephone. You’ll find the copies in the file.”

O’Hara walked to the file, and turned up the copies. Jerry joined him. They read the letters gloomily. The addresses of the three firms to whom the orders had been sent were in Bristol, Newcastle, and Glasgow.

“Have you had any letters from them, then?” asked O’Hara:

“No,” Madeleine told him.

“And was it yourself posted the letters that went out?”

“No. Mr. Bloggs posted them.”

“Did he now?” murmured O’Hara. “Did he now?”

Jerry looked at him uneasily.

“What’s that mean?” he asked.

“Of course, ye couldn’t guess?” said O’Hara. Then suddenly shot out, “What’s his private address?” Receiving no immediate answer he exclaimed, “What! Don’t any of ye know it?”

“Do you?” retorted Madeleine.

Fingleton thought it time to play his signature tune.

“From next Monday,” he said, “Mr. Bloggs will be at No. 19a, Fenner Crescent, W.2. Meanwhile he—er—is staying at an hotel.”

“What hotel?”

“He did not mention that to me. Perhaps——?”

The clerk glanced around, to be met by silence. It was clear that Mr. Bloggs had not mentioned it to anybody. O’Hara asked:

“Is there a directory in the office?”

“Telephone,” answered Madeleine.

“That’s not the one I’m thinkin’ of,” said O’Hara, and ran out of the room.

He was away ten minutes. During the first eight no one spoke a word. A horrible depression was strangling speech, and the only creative work performed lay to the doubtful credit of the office-boy, who added twenty-six more cupids to the stamp book. It was the commissionaire, ascending from the lonely street, who broke the long silence and prevented the birth of Cupid No. 27. Poking his head through the doorway, he enquired:

“When’s the Ole Man expected?”

“What makes you ask that?” demanded Jerry.

“I lent him half-a-crown yesterday,” said Smith. “For his taxi.”

“You’re lucky if that’s all you lent him,” murmured Jerry, which was hardly the way to speak of a Chief to a commissionaire.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh!” After a moment’s hesitation, Smith went on, “Anything up?”

“We hope not,” replied Madeleine.

“If there is, we shall all learn in due course,” added Fingleton.

“P’raps, but I was never one for due course. I like to know. Same as at race meetings. When Mr. O’Hara went out jest now he acted, as you might say, peculiar. Very peculiar. ‘Smith,’ he sez to me, ‘Smith,’ he sez, ‘I hope you’re not too fond of your present job.’ ‘Doing nothing suits me all right,’ I sez. ‘Well,’ sez he, ‘if you ain’t soon looking for a job doing nothing outside somebody else’s office,’ he sez, ‘Bob’s me uncle.’ That’s his words. Bob’s me uncle. Now, what did he mean by that?”

“You’d better ask him,” suggested Fingleton, shortly.

He would like to have been able to tell the commissionaire he was interfering with their work, but there wasn’t any work. It may have been because of his consciousness of this that Smith lingered, and a few moments later O’Hara returned.

“I’ve some pretty news for ye,” he announced breezily, as he entered. “I’ve been to a post office, and I’ve consulted our old friend Kelly. There’s no 19a in Fenner Crescent, W.2, because there’s no Fenner Crescent, W.2. In fact, there’s no Fenner Crescent anywhere. So, lads and lassies, what?” He turned to the commissionaire. “It’s as I was tellin’ ye, Smith. You’ll have to be afther a new job.”

“Not till I get my half-crown back!” retorted Smith, feelingly.

“Is it only half-a-crown he owes ye?”

“No, sir, he owes me a darn sight more’n that. Two weeks wages. Ay, and twenty pounds on top of that!”

Madeleine and Jerry looked up sharply. Fingleton kept his eyes on his boots. They were rather dazed eyes, and they stared at the boots as though unable quite to take them in. The boots looked a bit misty.

“Twenty pounds?” said Jerry.

“It’s a fact,” answered Smith.

“How does that happen?”

“Well, see, I’m sort of in the business—if you get me?”

“I’m afraid, Smith, it’s Mr. Bloggs who’s got you,” replied Jerry, gravely, “and he’s got me, too.”

“How much for?”

It was Madeleine’s question. She coloured after asking it, and Jerry looked at her with growing anxiety.

“If you want to know—and I don’t feel this is a moment for any of us to hide anything—I’ve put £250 into the business.”

“My God!” exclaimed Madeleine. “That makes my ninety look like dirt.”

Jerry moistened his dry lips, and it was a good thing for Mr. Bloggs that he did not walk in at that moment. Controlling himself with difficulty, Jerry turned to the clerk.

“I—I hope——” he began.

But Fingleton’s expression dashed the hope. Fingleton was looking green.

“Er—yes—I did think, so to speak—a little flutter,” he gulped. “I—er—yes.”

“I hope, old chap, it was only a very little flutter?”

The size of the flutter suddenly overwhelmed William Fingleton, and he leapt to his feet.

“One hundred and twenty-five pounds!” he shrieked. “One hundred and twenty-five pounds!”

Then he looked ashamed and astonished at himself, and sat down again quietly. In answer to enquiring glances, O’Hara shook his head.

“I’m luckier,” he said. “All I’ve lost is me time, me petrol, and the wear and tear of me tyres. How about you, Winkle?”

Robert Tonsil, thus unceremoniously addressed, grinned. He had not yet developed any high spot of altruistic sympathy, nor shed any of his youthful keenness for sensation. Sensation of any kind. Wars, murders, corpses, fallen horses, things going up, things going bust. It didn’t matter what. Anything that cut across the disastrous sameness of one ordinary hour to another.

“I never ’ad nothink to lose,” he retorted. “See, I ain’t no fernancier!”

O’Hara made a swift calculation.

“Then it looks,” he said, at the end of it, “as if our Mr. Bloggs—if he doesn’t turn up—has walked off with four hundred and eighty-five pounds, two-and-sixpence. Excluding unpaid salaries.”

“Yes, and these,” added Madeleine, taking a little pile of papers from a drawer, “are unpaid bills!”

Desperately clinging to hope, Fingleton reminded them that they were only pursuing a theory, and that calamity, though probable, was not yet certain.

“There is one calamity, Mr. Fingleton, that grows more and more certain,” responded the Irishman, and he spoke with impressive conviction, “and that is the calamity that is goin’ to fall upon Mr. Bloggs when we find him!”

“Meanwhile, it falls upon us,” said Jerry, dryly, “and what are we going to do about it? I’m afraid, Fingleton, there’s no doubt that Bloggs is a rascal—and that we have all been mugs! The facts that he never mentioned the name of his temporary hotel, and that he invented the fictitious address he said he was moving to—well, they just shout! But, by Jove, we’ll——”

He was interrupted by the telephone bell. Madeleine, seated nearest to the instrument, seized the receiver.

“If it’s Bloggs,” whispered O’Hara, “call him every name ye can think of!”

But it was not Bloggs.

“Spare Parts Limited,” said Madeleine. “Yes. No, I’m afraid he isn’t. Who——? No, he didn’t mention it. He—he may be in at any moment. That is—— Oh, you don’t think so? ... Anyone else? Well, the assistant manager, Mr. Haines. Er——” She glanced towards Jerry. “Wait a moment, please. I’ll just find out.” Placing her hand over the mouth of the receiver, she asked, ironically, “Would you be free, Mr. Haines, to see a lady who wants to call on urgent business?”

“When does she want to call?” replied Jerry.

“She says she can be here in twenty minutes,” answered Madeleine, “and I don’t much like her tone.”

“Nothing, this morning, is strictly likeable,” said Jerry. “Tell her to come along.”

Madeleine poured the information down the receiver, and then asked, “Just one moment, please. I didn’t quite catch the name? What? ... Yes, thank you. Good-bye.”

She replaced the receiver.

“Her name is Lucy Clover,” she said, “and she told us not to expect a four-leaf one, and her final remark was that she would have come whether you’d been engaged or not!”

“Aren’t we a happy family, now?” murmured Tim O’Hara.