'Let me look.' Mr. Dering took the paper and examined it. His eyes hardened as he looked. 'You call this my handwriting, Checkley?' 'I--I--I did think it was,' the clerk stammered. 'Let me look again. And I think so still,' he added more firmly. 'Then you're a fool. Look again. When did I ever sign like that?' Mr. Dering's handwriting was one of those which are impossible to be read by any except his own clerks, and then only when they know what to expect. Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language, he expressed the important words by an initial, a medial, or a final consonant, and made scratches for all the words between; his clerks, however, understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a _ballade_, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there. For his signature, however, that was different. It was the signature of the Firm: it was a signature a hundred and twenty years old: it was an eighteenth-century signature: bold, large, and clear, every letter fully formed: with dots and flourishes, the last letter concluding with a fantasia of penmanship belonging to a time when men knew how to write, belonging to the decorative time of penmanship. 'Two of the dots are out of place,' said Checkley, 'and the flourish isn't quite what it should be. But the cheque itself looks like your hand,' he added stoutly. 'I ought to have seen that there was something wrong about the signature, though it isn't much. I own to that. But the writing is like yours, and I would swear to it still.' 'It isn't my handwriting at all, then. Where is the counterfoil?' Checkley turned over the counterfoils. 'What is the date?' he asked. 'March the 4th? I can't find it. Here are cheques for the 3rd and for the 6th, but none at all for the 4th.' 'Let me look.' Strange! There was no counterfoil. And the numbers did not agree with that on the cheque. 'You haven't got another cheque book, have you?' 'No; I certainly have not.' Mr. Dering sat with the cheque in his hand, looking at it. Then he compared it with a blank cheque. 'Why,' he said, 'this cheque is drawn from an old book--two years old--one of the books before the bank amalgamated and changed its title and the form of the cheques--not much of a change, it is true--but--how could we be such fools, Checkley, as not to see the difference?' 'Then somebody or other must have got hold of an old cheque book. Shameful! To have cheque books lying about for every common rogue to go and steal!'