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 tion; but when they saw that he was completely disconcerted they consulted somebody behind and then asked him on whose account the money had been taken out; for certainly it had been drawn on a cheque, a deposit account or something of that sort. Naturally Prokop did not know. Further, they told him, it was possible that the person in question had only sold certain bills, in which case there would be no record of his name in their books. And when, finally, Prokop informed them that he had simply no idea whether the money was paid out by this particular bank or not they burst out laughing and inquired whether he was going round the two hundred and fifty-odd financial institutions, agencies and exchanges in Prague with the same question. So Prokop’s marvellous inspiration proved a complete failure.

There only remained the fourth possibility, the chance that he would meet her. Prokop tried to introduce method even into this possibility; he divided the map of Prague into sections and examined each one twice daily. One day he calculated the number of people he would meet in this way in one day and arrived at a total of nearly forty thousand; bearing in mind the total population of the city it worked out that the chances were one in twenty that he would meet her. Even this small probability gave him hope. There were certain streets and places in which she was more likely to reside, or along which she was likely to be walking; streets with acacias in bloom, venerable old squares, intimate corners of deep and serious life. It was surely impossible that she should be found in the