"Have we done any good?" asked Peggie, drawing a deep breath of free air as soon as they were outside the gates. "Any bit of good?" "There's the affair of the bank-note," answered Selwood. "That may be of some moment. I'll go and report progress on that, anyway." He put Peggie into her car to go home, and himself hailed a taxi-cab and drove straight to Mr. Halfpenny's office, where Professor Cox-Raythwaite and Mr. Tertius had arranged to meet him. CHAPTER XXVII THE LAST CHEQUE The three elderly gentlemen, seated in Mr. Halfpenny's private room, listened with intense, if silent, interest to Selwood's account of the interview with Barthorpe. It was a small bundle of news that he had brought back and two of his hearers showed by their faces that they attached little importance to it. But Professor Cox-Raythwaite caught eagerly at the mere scrap of suggestion. "Tertius!--Halfpenny!" he exclaimed. "That must be followed up--we must follow it up at once. That bank-note may be a most valuable and effective clue." Mr. Halfpenny showed a decided incredulity and dissent. "I don't see it," he answered. "Don't see it at all, Cox-Raythwaite. What is there in it? What clue can there be in the fact that Barthorpe picked up a hundred pound bank-note from his uncle's writing-desk? Lord bless me!--why, every one of us four men knows very well that hundred pound notes were as common to Jacob Herapath as half-crowns are to any of us! He was a man who carried money in large amounts on him always--I've expostulated with him about it. Don't you know--no, I dare say you don't though, because you never had business dealings with him, and perhaps Tertius doesn't, either, because he, like you, only knew him as a friend--you don't know that Jacob had a peculiarity. Perhaps Mr. Selwood knows of it, though, as he was his secretary." "What peculiarity?" asked the Professor. "I know he had several fads, which one might call peculiarities."