“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Vendale.  “The clerk will pick the things up.”

“This dreadful news!” repeated Obenreizer, persisting in collecting the envelopes.  “This dreadful news!”

“If you will read the letter,” said Vendale, “you will find I have exaggerated nothing.  There it is, open on my desk.”

He resumed his search, and in a moment more discovered the forged receipt.  It was on the numbered and printed form, described by the Swiss firm.  Vendale made a memorandum of the number and the date.  Having replaced the receipt and locked up the iron chamber, he had leisure to notice Obenreizer, reading the letter in the recess of a window at the far end of the room.

“Come to the fire,” said Vendale.  “You look perished with the cold out there.  I will ring for some more coals.”

Obenreizer rose, and came slowly back to the desk.  “Marguerite will be as sorry to hear of this as I am,” he said, kindly.  “What do you mean to do?”

“I am in the hands of Defresnier and Company,” answered Vendale.  “In my total ignorance of the circumstances, I can only do what they recommend.  The receipt which I have just found, turns out to be the numbered and printed form.  They seem to attach some special importance to its discovery.  You have had experience, when you were in the Swiss house, of their way of doing business.  Can you guess what object they have in view?”

Obenreizer offered a suggestion.

“Suppose I examine the receipt?” he said.

“Are you ill?” asked Vendale, startled by the change in his face, which now showed itself plainly for the first time.  “Pray go to the fire.  You seem to be shivering—­I hope you are not going to be ill?”

“Not I!” said Obenreizer.  “Perhaps I have caught cold.  Your English climate might have spared an admirer of your English institutions.  Let me look at the receipt.”

Vendale opened the iron chamber.  Obenreizer took a chair, and drew it close to the fire.  He held both hands over the flames.  “Let me look at the receipt,” he repeated, eagerly, as Vendale reappeared with the paper in his hand.  At the same moment a porter entered the room with a fresh supply of coals.  Vendale told him to make a good fire.  The man obeyed the order with a disastrous alacrity.  As he stepped forward and raised the scuttle, his foot caught in a fold of the rug, and he discharged his entire cargo of coals into the grate.  The result was an instant smothering of the flame, and the production of a stream of yellow smoke, without a visible morsel of fire to account for it.

“Imbecile!” whispered Obenreizer to himself, with a look at the man which the man remembered for many a long day afterwards.

“Will you come into the clerks’ room?” asked Vendale.  “They have a stove there.”

“No, no.  No matter.”

Vendale handed him the receipt.  Obenreizer’s interest in examining it appeared to have been quenched as suddenly and as effectually as the fire itself.  He just glanced over the document, and said, “No; I don’t understand it!  I am sorry to be of no use.”