She wasn’t speaking to me but to the clerk at the watch-repair counter, which was just opposite the coffee sets: “Bad?” she was saying. “Oh, you must mean counterfeit. Did I really have one? How interesting; please let me see.” And she put a small gloved hand across the counter for the bank note which he held. A new twenty, I noticed it was, and then I looked again at her. Without any doubt, I knew her voice; I was absolutely certain I’d talked to her; but her face was a complete surprise to me. A pleasant surprise, right enough; she was rather a little thing, slender but with rounded neck and arms, in actually beautiful proportions; about twenty-two in age, I guessed. She had nice, clear white-and-pink skin; good, bold little mouth and a sort of I-dare-you-chin. Her nose turned up the barest trifle, darned attractively, and though I couldn’t from the side get a view of her eyes, it was pretty plain they weren’t easy ones to meet. Anyway, that clerk wobbled before her as he apologized that the government that week had just warned the banks and all big business houses in Chicago that new and unusually dangerous counterfeits of twenty-dollar Federal Reserve Notes were in circulation. “Dangerous?” said my friend. “You mean the ink’s poisonous or something like that?” She seemed glad she had her gloves on. The clerk laughed. “Oh, it’s quite safe that way, Miss Wellington. They mean, it’s an unusually good job of counterfeiting; very hard indeed to detect. In fact, they say in this case the printing and coloring is actually perfect, to all practical purposes. It is only the paper which is enough off so that an expert, like our cashier, suspected it.” Miss Wellington opened her hand bag. “How interesting! But would you ask your clever cashier to look over these bills for me to make sure they’re all right? Why, what a frightful place Chicago is; I got in just this morning from Denver and bought a few things at Field’s and along Michigan Avenue, breaking a hundred-dollar bill somewhere, I can’t remember exactly where, and getting change----” I heard, of course, but didn’t actually pay any attention to the rest she was saying. Miss Wellington of Denver! Now I didn’t know any Miss Wellington of Denver or any other place; but I did know that girl; her voice, anyway. She certainly had talked to me; and also, I was sure, I knew her hands and her figure, if I didn’t know her face. She had one glove off now, feeling the texture of the counterfeit bill in comparison with the others in her hand bag, which proved to be quite all right. Yes; I knew that pretty, slender, strong little hand. She was going out now, after having given to the cashier--who had come up--the information that she _thought_ she had broken her hundred dollars at Field’s and got her change there and supplying him with her Chicago address as the Blackstone Hotel. “Beg pardon, sir,” said the coffee-set salesman, “did you make a choice?”