is hand: then he forced himself to look all round the
coffee-room: at Polly, at the waitresses, at the piles of pallid buns
upon the counter. But, involuntarily, his mild blue eyes wandered back
lovingly to the long piece of string, on which his playful imagination
no doubt already saw a series of knots which would be equally
tantalising to tie and to untie.

"Tell me about the theft at the English Provident Bank," suggested Polly
condescendingly.

He looked at her, as if she had proposed some mysterious complicity in
an unheard-of crime. Finally his lean fingers sought the end of the
piece of string, and drew it towards him. His face brightened up in a
moment.

"There was an element of tragedy in that particular robbery," he began,
after a few moments of beatified knotting, "altogether different to that
connected with most crimes; a tragedy which, as far as I am concerned,
would seal my lips for ever, and forbid them to utter a word, which
might lead the police on the right track."

"Your lips," suggested Polly sarcastically, "are, as far as I can see,
usually sealed before our long-suffering, incompetent police and--"

"And you should be the last to grumble at this," he quietly interrupted,
"for you have spent some very pleasant half-hours already, listening to
what you have termed my 'cock-and-bull' stories. You know the English
Provident Bank, of course, in Oxford Street; there were plenty of
sketches of it at the time in the illustrated papers. Here is a photo of
the outside. I took it myself some time ago, and only wish I had been
cheeky or lucky enough to get a snap-shot of the interior. But you see
that the office has a separate entrance from the rest of the house,
which was, and still is, as is usual in such cases, inhabited by the
manager and his family.

"Mr. Ireland was the manager then; it was less than six months ago. He
lived over the bank, with his wife and family, consisting of a son, who
was clerk in the business, and two or three younger children. The house
is really smaller than it looks on this photo, for it has no depth, and
only one set of rooms on each floor looking out into the street, the
back of the house being nothing but the staircase. Mr. Ireland and his
family, therefore, occupied the whole of it.

"As for the business premises, they were, and, in fact, are, of the
usual pattern; an office with its rows of desks, clerks, and cashiers,
and beyond, through a glass door, the manager's