On Tuesday morning the letter with the bills arrived at the bank. Following the routine, they went to the discount department, were discounted and placed to my credit. As I had a balance of L20,000, when the proceeds of the bills were added to it, it brought up the whole to the handsome sum of L46,000. [Illustration: "THE DAY OF MY DESTINY IS OVER."--Page 304.] When the bills arrived at the bank a strange thing occurred. The fatal omission was made on an acceptance of Blydenstein & Co., a great banking firm in London. The discount clerk noticed the omission of the date of acceptance, but this being a mere formality, he thought it a clerical error on the part of the bookkeeper of Blydenstein & Co. He made no report of the matter, and it was discounted along with the other eighteen, which were put away in the vaults with the batches that had preceded it, while he laid this one aside until the next day, which was Wednesday. At half past ten he gave it to the bank messenger, telling him when he went his regular rounds to take the bill to Blydenstein's and request them to correct the omission. At 2 p.m. on Tuesday Noyes went to Jay Cooke & Co. and ordered $100,000 in United States bonds, and gave them a check on the Bank of England for the amount. He was to call for the bonds next day, of course, after the check had gone through the Clearing House and had been paid. As soon as the bank opened on Wednesday, in order to test if everything was all right, Noyes sent in a messenger with a small check, and the money was thrown out as at all other times without remark. And that was a complete demonstration that everything was all right. So it was then, but within thirty minutes from that second the messenger was going to start with the bill to Blydenstein's for correction. This was 10 o'clock Wednesday. The bills had been twenty-five hours in the possession of the bank, had been discounted and the proceeds placed to my credit for twenty-four hours. Who with intellect less than an archangel's could have divined the true combination? First of all, that men brilliant and clever, gambling with their lives, could have made such an omission, damning, fatal. Second, if made, that the great Bank of England, thought absolutely infallible by the whole world, conservative, supposedly cautious, would have discounted a bill for L20,00 with the date out of the acceptance, and having done so, hold the bill well on into the second day, without a discovery, and that, too, when the firm whose acceptance was a forgery was not 100 yards away! So when at 10 o'clock on Wednesday Mac saw the small check paid without question to the messenger it seemed he had an assurance doubly sure and a bond of fate that all was well, and that the last batch of bills was packed safely away for another three months in the vaults of the bank.