‘I’d much the same experience,’ said Dr Alden. ‘As I gave the man my half-crown I mentioned that I was a collector of threepenny bits, and asked him if he could help me. He gave me two shillings and three pennies. ‘“Well,” he said, “if you like to step off at the Bank of England and ask the Chief Cashier to give you threepennies for that little lot, you can mention my name.”’ ‘It’s quite possible,’ said the chairman, ‘that those conductors had not got the threepennies to give you. I go for days sometimes without as much as seeing a threepenny bit. It really looks as if the problem presented more difficulties than I had at first supposed. Did you manage to surmount them, Mr Matthews?’ ‘Can’t say I did, though I took a lot of trouble about it. There’s no two ways about it—if you put an unreasonable request to a complete stranger, whether he’s a bus-conductor or anything else, you’re likely to be sat on and not to get what you want either. I picked a bus in the slack time, running nearly empty, with a good-natured-looking conductor. I chatted with him for five minutes, and got him friendly disposed towards me, before I even mentioned threepennies. Then I asked him if he got many of them. He said he took enough of them to fill a pint-pot some days and he wished he didn’t. They were finicky things to handle and easy dropped. Well, that was a very good start. I gave him a half-crown for my threepenny ticket and told him that I would be glad to take as many threepenny bits off his hands as he liked to give me. Said I wanted them for a young nephew of mine. The man was quite willing, and if anybody had offered me twenty pounds just then for my chance of winning the prize to-night I’d have refused it. If anybody would give me twenty pence for the same chance at the present moment I’d jump at it. The trouble came in just as the chairman has indicated. The man looked through his silver and did his best for me, but one solitary threepenny was all he could raise. I got that one, of course, but one is not nine. It was just rotten bad luck. He said that nineteen days in twenty he could have given me a dozen of them, but he supposed it had to happen so.’ ‘You call that bad luck?’ said the Hon. James Feldane gloomily. ‘Not half as bitter as mine.’ ‘We’ll have the story of your failure, Jimmy,’ said the chairman. ‘Failure’s nothing. I’ve failed before and shall do again. It’s what happened afterwards that worries me. All the same, I don’t know that I should have failed if I had simply trusted to my own judgment, but the woman looked so smart and brainy that I let myself be influenced, though she was really talking clotted nonsense.’ ‘You’re getting on too quickly,’ said the chairman. ‘To what woman do you refer?’