CHAPTER XVII.
On the Track "Le vrai moyen d'etre trompe c'est de se croire plus fin que les autres." I stole out of the house before daybreak the next morning, and riding to Yarmouth, took a very early and (with perhaps a subtle appropriateness) a very fishy train to London.
So ill equipped was I to contend with a financier of Miste's force that I did not even know the hour at which the London banks opened for business.

A general idea, however, that half-past ten would make quite a long enough day for such work made me hope to be in time to frustrate or perchance to catch red-handed this clever miscreant.
The train was due to arrive at Liverpool Street station at ten o'clock, and ten minutes after that hour I stepped from a cab at the door of the great bank in Lombard Street.
"The manager," I said, hurriedly, to an individual in brass buttons and greased hair, whose presence in the building was evidently for a purely ornamental purpose.

I was shown into a small glass room like a green-house, where sat two managers, as under a microscope--a living example of frock-coated respectability and industry to half a hundred clerks who were ever peeping that way as they turned the pages of their ledgers and circulated in an undertone the latest chop-house tale.
"Mr.Howard," said the manager, with his watch in his hand.

"I was waiting for you." "Have you cashed the draft ?" "Yes--at ten o'clock.

The payee was waiting on the doorstep for us to open.