“Oh!” He recalled himself to his concerns with a jerk, and fumbled in his pockets.  “I had a letter,” he explained.

“Vere is de letter?”

He found it, after an exciting search, and passed it over.  The whiskered face developed a hand to receive it.

“I don’t know what it’s about,” explained Lucas.

“Perhaps your people have made a mistake in the name, or something.”

“Our beoble,” said the face in the pigeon-hole, with malignant emphasis, “do nod make mistagues!”

There was an interval while the letter was read, and Lucas stood and fidgeted, with a sense that he was intrusive and petty and undesired.  “Yes,” said the owner of the spectacles, at length.  “You vait.  I vill enguire.”

He left his pigeon-hole unshuttered, and to Lucas, while he waited, it seemed that several men came to it and glanced at him forbiddingly.  None spoke; they just looked as though in righteous indignation at his presence, with seventy-five cents in his pocket, in that high temple of finance.  Then the whiskered and spectacled face fitted itself again into the aperture.

“So you are Mr. Robert H. Lugas, are you?” it inquired.  “Den vere vas you in de year 1886?”

“Where was I?” repeated Lucas vaguely.  “Let me see! 1886—­yes!  I was in Russia then—­in Tambov.”

“Yes.”  The other’s regard was keen.  “An’ now tell me aboud de man dat lived obbosite to you in Tambov?”

“Do you mean the silversmith?” said Lucas.  The other nodded.  “Oh, him!  He was a Jew.  They expelled him.”

“And his vife?”

“His wife!  They expelled her too,” he answered.  “I never heard of her again.”

“Vot vas de last you heard of her?”

“Oh, that!”

Lucas was staring at him vacantly.  It did not occur to him that, by not answering promptly, he might give ground for doubt and suspicion.  The question had re-illuminated in his mind—­perhaps for the first time since the event which it touched—­that night of twenty years before.  He flavored again the heady and effervescent vintage of strong action, of crowded happenings and poignant emotions.

“Veil?” demanded the other.

“There was a police officer,” began Lucas obediently; “his name was Semianoff;” and in bald, halting words he told the story.  He told it absently, languidly, for no words within his reach could convey the thing as it dwelt in his memory, the warmth and color of it, its uplifting and transfiguring quality.

The man behind the pigeon-hole heard him intently.

“Yes,” he said again, as Lucas finished.  “You are de man.  Ve do not reguire further broof, Mr. Lugas.”

He produced a slip of paper and a pen which he laid on the ledge before his pigeon-hole.

“I am instrugted to say dat if you vill fill in and sign dis cheque, ve vill cash it.”

“Eh?” Lucas was slow to understand.

“Ve vill cash it,” repeated the other.  “You fill it in—­and sign it—­ and I vill cash it now.”