The girl from Scotland Yard

By Edgar Wallace

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Title: The girl from Scotland Yard

Author: Edgar Wallace

Release date: August 12, 2025 [eBook #76677]

Language: English

Original publication: Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc, 1926

Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRL FROM SCOTLAND YARD ***





 THE
 GIRL FROM
 SCOTLAND YARD

 EDGAR WALLACE




 DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.
 GARDEN CITY--NEW YORK--1928




 [COPYRIGHT]

 COPYRIGHT, 1926, 1927, BY EDGAR
 WALLACE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.




 CONTENTS

 I. At Tea
 II. The Girl Detective
 III. Meeting Peter
 IV. Peter’s Lodgings
 V. A Dead Man
 VI. The Effect on Lady Raytham
 VII. Leslie’s Interview
 VIII. A Surprise for Leslie
 IX. Druze’s Handicap
 X. A Doctor’s Confession
 XI. The Document
 XII. Peter’s Mother
 XIII. Peter Tells
 XIV. An Arrest
 XV. Trapped
 XVI. An Old Record
 XVII. The Telltale Perfume
 XVIII. Anita’s Fright
 XIX. Captured
 XX. A Silk Shawl
 XXI. Anita’s Cards
 XXII. A Real Father
 XXIII. And a Mother
 XXIV. These Women




 THE GIRL FROM
 SCOTLAND YARD

 CHAPTER I.
 AT TEA

As Lady Raytham drew aside the long velvet curtains, she looked down
into Berkeley Square. It was half-past four o’clock on a cheerless
February evening. Rain and sleet were falling and a thin yellow mist
added to the gloom of the dying day. An interminable string of cars
and taxicabs was turning toward Berkeley Street, their shining black
roofs reflecting the glare of the overhead light that had just then
hissed and spluttered to life.

She looked blankly toward the desolation of the gardens, a place of
bare-limbed trees and shivering shrubs--stared, as though she expected
to see some fog wraith take a definite and menacing shape and give
tangible form to the shadows that menaced reason and life.

She was a woman of twenty-eight, straight and slim. Hers was the type
of classical beauty which would defy the markings of age for the
greater part of a lifetime. A fascinating face, calm, austere. Her
eyes were a cold English gray. You might imagine her the patrician
abbess of some great conventual establishment, or a lady of broad
manors defending inexorably the stark castle of her lord against the
enemy who came in his absence. Analyse her face, feature by feature,
put one with the other, and judge her by the standards which profess
to measure such things, and brow and chin said “purpose” with
unmistakable emphasis.

She was not in her purposeful mood now; rather was she uncertain and
irritable, the nearest emotions to fear that she knew.

She let the curtains fall back until they overlapped, and walked
across to the fireplace, glancing at the tiny clock. The salon was
half lit; the wall sconces were dark, but the big lamp on the table
near the settee glowed brightly. This room bore evidence of money
lavishly spent. The greater part of its furnishings would one day
reach the museums of millionaire collectors; three pictures that hung
upon the apple-green walls were earmarked for the National Gallery.

As she stood looking down into the fire, there was a gentle tap at the
door, and the butler came in. He was a tall man, rather portly in his
way; a man with double chin and an unlined face. He carried a small
salver in his hand, a buff oblong in the centre.

Lady Raytham tore open the envelope. It was dated from Constantinople,
and was from Raytham. She had been expecting the telegram all that
afternoon. Raytham, of course, had changed his plans. In that sentence
was epitomized his life and career. He was going on to Basra and
thence to Bushire, to see the interstate oil wells, or the sites of
them. He was expensively apologetic for two closely written sheets. If
he could not return before April, would she go on to Cannes as she had
arranged? He was “awfully sorry,” he must have said that at least four
times.

She read it again, folded the pink sheets and laid them on the table.

The butler was waiting, head slightly bent forward as though to catch
her slightest whisper. She did not look at him.

“Thank you.”

“Thank you, m’lady.”

He was opening the door when she spoke.

“Druze, I am expecting the Princess Bellini and possibly Mrs. Gurden.
I will have tea when they come.”

“Very good, m’lady.”

The door closed softly behind him. She raised her sombre eyes and
looked at the polished wood of it with a curious, listening lift of
her head as though she expected to hear something. But the butler was
going slowly down the stairs, a quizzical smile in his eyes; his
white, plump hands sliding in and over one another. He stopped on the
landing to admire the little marble statue of Circe that his lordship
had brought from Sicily. It was a habit of his to admire that Circe
with the sly eyes and the beckoning finger. And as he looked, his
mouth was puckered as though he were whistling.

A sharp rat-tat on the door made him withdraw from his contemplation.
He reached the hall as the second footman opened the door.

Two women entered. Through the open door he had a glimpse of a
limousine drawing away.

“Her ladyship is in the drawing room, your highness. Shall I take your
highness’s coat?”

“You can’t,” said the first and the bigger woman brusquely. “Help Mrs.
Gurden out of hers. Why you wear such horrible contraptions I can’t
understand.”

Mrs. Gurden smiled largely.

“Darling, I must wear something. Thank you, Druze.”

Druze took the transparent silk coat and handed it to the second
footman. The princess was already stamping up the stairs. She pushed
open the door and walked in unannounced. Lady Raytham, standing by the
fire, her head pillowed on her arm, looked up, startled.

“I’m so awfully sorry. Push the lights, Anita. The button is by your
hand. Well?”

The Princess Anita Bellini struggled unaided out of her tweed coat and
threw it over the back of a chair, jerked off her hat with another
movement and tossed it after the coat.

People who saw Anita Bellini for the first time gazed at her in awe;
there was a certain ruthless strength in every line, every feature.
She was something more than fifty and was just under six feet in
height.

The masculinity of the powerful face was emphasized by the gray hair,
cut close in an Eton crop, and the rimless monocle which never left
her eye. Between her white teeth she gripped a long amber holder in
which a cigarette was burning.

Her speech was direct, abrupt, almost shocking in its frankness.

“Greta?”

She jerked the end of the cigarette holder toward the door.

“Being fussed over by Druze. That woman would ogle a dustman! She’s
that age. It is a horrible thing to have been pretty once and to have
produced certain reactions. You can never believe that the spirit has
evaporated.”

Jane Raytham smiled.

“They say you were an awfully pretty girl, Nita----” she began.

“They lie,” said Princess Anita calmly. “Russell’s used to retouch my
photographs till there was nothing left but the background.”

Greta floated in, hands outstretched, her big red mouth opened
ecstatically.

“Darling!” she burst forth, and caught both Jane’s hands in hers.
Anita Bellini’s fleshy nose wrinkled in a sneer.

And yet she should have grown accustomed to Mrs. Gurden, for ecstasy
was Greta’s normal condition. She had that habit of touching people,
holding them by the arms, stooping to look up into their faces with
her big black eyes that sometimes squinted a little.

She had been pretty, but now her face was long and a little haggard,
the face of a woman who was so afraid of missing something that she
could not spare the time to sleep. Her lips were heavily carmined, her
eyes carefully made up as though she were still expecting a call to
return to the chorus from which Anita had rescued her.

“My lovely Jane! Exquisite as usual. That dress--don’t tell me!
Chenel--isn’t it?”

“Is it?” Jane Raytham scarcely looked down. “No, I think it is a dress
I bought in New York last year.”

Greta shook her head speechlessly.

Anita Bellini blew out a smoke ring and tapped off the ash in the
fireplace.

“Greta lays it on thick when she lays it at all,” she said, and cast a
critical eye over her hostess. “You’re peaky, Jane. Missing your
husband?”

“Terribly.”

The irony of tone was not lost on Anita.

“Raytham--what is he doing? The man is ill of money and yet won’t take
a day off making it. Where the---- Oh, here he is.”

Druze wheeled in the tea wagon.

“Give me a whisky-and-soda, Druze, or I’ll perish!”

She drank the contents of the goblet at a gulp and handed back the
glass. She fixed her monocle more firmly and lit another cigarette.
The door closed behind the butler.

“Druze wears well, Jane. Where did you get him?”

Lady Raytham looked up quickly.

“Does he? I scarcely notice him. He has always been the same as long
as I can remember. He was with Lord Everreed before.”

“That goes back a few years. I remember him when he was a young man.”

The princess had an unhappy habit of smiling with her mouth closed. It
was not very pretty.

“It is funny how age comes: thirty to fifty goes like a flash of
lightning!”

She changed the subject abruptly and talked about her call of the
afternoon.

“I went for bridge and got a string quartet playing every kind of
music except one with a tune in it.”

“It was lovely!” exclaimed Greta, her eyes screwed tight in an agony
of admiration.

“It was rotten,” retorted the gray-haired Anita. “And more rotten
because my sister-in-law was there. The woman’s narrowness depresses
me.”

Lady Raytham’s eyes had returned to the fire.

“Oh!” she said.

“I asked her what she was going to do about Peter. Thank heavens she
has a little sense there! Peter has been wiped off the slate. Margaret
would not even discuss him. The only person who believed in him is
Everreed, but Everreed was always a simpleton. He would never have
prosecuted, but the bank forced his hand.”

She said this with some satisfaction. She had never liked her nephew,
and Peter hated her, hated her gibes at him when he, the son of a
wealthy man, had preferred a private secretaryship with that great
parliamentarian, Viscount Everreed, to entering his father’s bank. She
had sat in court with a contemptuous smile on her lips when the
haggard boy had been sentenced for forging his employer’s name to a
check for five thousand pounds.

The woman by the fire stirred her tea absently.

“When does----”

“He come out? About now, I think. Let me see. He had seven years, and
they tell me that these people get a remission of sentence for good
conduct--three months in every year. Why, Heaven knows. We pay
enormous sums to catch ’em, and as soon as they are safe under lock
and key, we go tinkering with the lock to get them out.”

“Disgraceful!” murmured Greta.

But Jane Raytham did not hear her.

“I wonder what he will do?” she mused. “Life will go pretty badly for
a man like Peter----”

“Rubbish!” Anita snapped the word. “For goodness’ sake don’t get
melancholy about Peter! He has been five years in prison; and at
Dartmoor, or wherever he is, they teach men to use their hands to do
something besides forge checks. He will probably make an excellent
farm hand.”

Lady Raytham shivered.

“Ugh! How awful!”

The princess smiled.

“Peter Dawlish is just a fool. He belongs to the type of humans that
is made for other people’s service. If you start worrying about Peter,
you’ll shed tears over the partridge that comes to your table! I
wonder what he thinks about Druze?”

Lady Raytham looked up.

“Do you think he still hates him?”

Anita pursed her large lips.

“Druze was Everreed’s butler and cashed the check; the next day Peter
disappears on his holiday--in reality on his great adventure. He
returns and is arrested, swears he knows nothing about the check, and
accuses poor Druze of forgery--which doesn’t save him from
imprisonment.”

Lady Raytham said nothing.

“Naturally Peter feels sore--if he was still right in believing Druze
the villain of the piece. There may be trouble; we needn’t deceive
ourselves.”

Her cigarette had gone out. She opened her bag with an impatient tug
and searched.

“Matches? Never mind.”

There was a letter in the bag; she tore a strip from the top and,
bending, lit the paper at the fire.

“Who is Leslie Maughan?”

She was glancing at the signature which footed the letter.

“Leslie Maughan! I don’t know him. Why?”

Anita crumpled the paper into a ball.

“Leslie Maughan would like to see me on a personal matter.” Anita
invented the stilted and supercilious accent which she supposed the
writer of the letter might assume. “And Leslie Maughan will be glad to
know what hour will be convenient for me to see him. He is an inventor
or a borrower of money, or he has an expedition to the Cocos Islands
that he would like me to finance. To the devil with Leslie Maughan!”




 CHAPTER II.
 THE GIRL DETECTIVE

Druze had come in noiselessly at the door and stood, hand clasping
hand. His face was strangely pale; as he spoke, his right cheek
twitched spasmodically.

“Yes?”

“Will your ladyship see Miss Leslie Maughan?”

“Miss!” exclaimed Anita, as Jane Raytham rose.

“Miss Leslie Maughan of the Criminal Investigation Department,
Scotland Yard?”

Lady Raytham put out her hand and gripped the back of the chair; her
face was bloodless; she opened her mouth to speak, but no word came.
Greta was staring at the big woman, but Princess Anita Bellini had no
eyes but for the pale butler.

“I will see her--in the small drawing room, Druze. Excuse me.”

She swept out of the room and pulled the door behind her until Druze
had disappeared round the lower landing. By her right hand was the
door of her own room, and she entered swiftly and noiselessly,
switching on the lights as she closed the door. She stared into the
mirror. Ghastly! That white, drawn face of hers carried confession.
Had she been betrayed? Had they fulfilled their threat?

Pulling out a drawer of her dressing table, she fumbled for and found
a little pot of rouge and with a quick, deft hand brought an
unaccustomed bloom to her cheeks.

Another glance at her face in the glass and she went out and sailed
down the stairs, a smile on her lips, and in her heart despair.

All the lights were lit in the little drawing room, and her first
emotion was one of surprise and relief. She had not known there were
women detectives at Scotland Yard, but she could imagine them as
hard-faced, sour creatures in ready-made clothes.

The girl who stood by the table looking down at the illustrated
newspaper that Druze had supplied looked to be about twenty-two. She
wore a straight nutria coat, a big bunch of violets pinned to one of
the revers. She was as tall as Jane Raytham and as straight; trim
silken ankles, neatly shod. The face under the upturned brim of a
little felt hat was more surprising yet. A pair of dark eyes rose to
meet Jane Raytham’s. The lips red as Greta’s, yet owing nothing to
artifice, were finely moulded. She had a firm, round chin, and the
hint of a white throat somewhere behind the protective fur. In some
confusion Lady Raytham catalogued the visible qualities of her
unexpected caller.

“You are not Miss Maughan?” she asked.

When Leslie Maughan smiled, she smiled with eyes and lips, and the
dimpled hollows that came to her cheeks made her seem absurdly young.

“Yes, that is my name, Lady Raytham. I am awfully sorry to bother you,
but my chief is rather a martinet.”

“You are a detective? I didn’t know----”

“That there were women detectives?” asked the girl. “And you’re right!
My position is unique. I am an assistant to Chief Inspector Coldwell.
The commissioners, who are rather conservative people, do not object
to that. But I suppose I really am a detective. I make inquiries.”

She stood by the table, one hand on her hip, one playing with the
leaves of the picture paper, her unwavering gaze fixed on Jane
Raytham.

“I’m making inquiries now, Lady Raytham,” she said quietly. “I want to
know why you drew twenty thousand pounds from your bank last Monday.”

For a second the woman was panic-stricken; so far lost control that
she all but stammered the truth. The will that held her silent,
apparently unmoved, was the supreme effort of her life. Then her
training came to her rescue.

The control of her voice was perfect.

“Since when have the police had authority to supervise the banking
accounts of private citizens?” she asked in cold, measured tones.
“That is an extraordinary request! Is it then an offence for me to
withdraw twenty thousand pounds from my own account? How did you
know?”

“One gets to know things, Lady Raytham.” She was cool, unruffled by
the indignation, real or simulated. “Lady Raytham, you think we are
being very impertinent and abominable. And it is certain that, if you
report this matter to Scotland Yard, I shall be reprimanded. But we
expect that----”

Jane Raytham had so far recovered toward the normal that she could
open her gray eyes in astonishment.

“Then why on earth have you come?” she asked.

She saw Leslie Maughan draw a deep breath; the ghost of a smile
trembled at the corner of her mouth and vanished.

“Twenty thousand pounds is a lot of money,” she said softly. There was
a note of pleading in her voice, and suddenly, with a cry she could
not suppress, the significance of the visit flashed upon the woman.
They knew. The police knew the destination or purpose of that money.

Her breath came faster; she could only look into those dark eyes in
fear and try as best she could to order her thoughts. Dark
eyes--violet, not the burned brown of Greta’s, but a violet that was
almost black. A detective--this slip of a girl! She was well dressed,
too; the femininity in Jane Raytham took stock of it unconsciously.
The gloves were from Renaud’s; only Renaud cut that quaint,
half-gauntlet wrist.

“Won’t you tell me? It might save you so much unhappiness. We try to
do that at the Yard--save people unhappiness. You’d never dream that,
would you? But the police are more like big brothers than ogres. Won’t
you?”

Jane Raytham shook her head; it was a mistake, the only one she made,
to attempt speech.

“No, I won’t!” she said breathlessly. “There is nothing to tell. Your
interference is unwarrantable. I shall write. I shall write.”

She swayed, and instantly Leslie Maughan was by her side; and the
strength of her grip was the second surprise that Jane Raytham had.

With an effort, she wrenched her arm free.

“Now you can go, please! And if I do not report you, it is because I
think you have acted in ignorance--overzeal.”

She nodded toward the door, and Leslie slowly gathered up her bag and
her umbrella.

“If you ever want me, you will find my telephone number on my card.”

Lady Raytham still held the crumpled card in her hand. Now she looked
at it and very deliberately walked to the fire and dropped it into the
flames.

“Or the telephone book,” said Leslie, as she went out.

Druze was in the hall, dry-washing his hands with nervous rapidity. He
hastened to the street door and opened it.

“Good-night, miss,” he said huskily, and she looked at him and
shivered. Why Leslie Maughan shivered she did not know, but she had at
that moment a vivid and terrifying illusion.

It was as though she were looking into the blank eyes of one who was
already dead.




 CHAPTER III.
 MEETING PETER

Leslie came striding briskly along the Thames Embankment. It was a
bitterly cold night, and the nutria coat was not proof against the icy
norther that was blowing. The man who walked by her side was head and
shoulders taller than she. He had the gait of a soldier, and his
umbrella twirled rhythmically to his pace.

“Suicide on the left,” he said pleasantly, as though he were a guide
pointing out the sights.

The girl checked her pace and looked back.

“Really? You don’t mean that, Mr. Coldwell?”

Her eyes were fixed upon the dark figure sprawling across the parapet,
his arms resting on the granite crown, his chin on his hands. He was a
gaunt figure of a man, differing in no respect from the waifs who
would gather here from midnight onward, and strive to snatch a little
sleep between the policeman’s visits.

“It is any odds,” said Mr. Coldwell carefully, “when you see one of
these birds watching the river in that way, he is thinking up a new
way of settling old accounts. Are you interested--sentimentally?”

She hesitated.

“Yes, a little. I don’t know whether it’s sentiment or just feminine
curiosity.”

She left his side abruptly and walked back to the man, who may have
been watching her out of the corner of his eyes, for he straightened
himself up quickly.

“Down and out?” she asked, and heard his soft laugh.

“Down but not out,” he replied, and it was the voice of an educated
man, with just a trace of that drawl, the pleasant stigmata which the
universities give to their children. “Did I arouse your compassion?
I’m sorry. If you offer me money I shall be rather embarrassed. You
will find plenty of poor beggars on this sidewalk who are more worthy
objects of--charity. I use the word in its purest sense.”

She looked at his face. A slight moustache and a ragged fringe of
beard did not disguise his youth. Chief Inspector Coldwell, who had
come closer, was watching him with professional interest.

“Would you like to know what I was really thinking about?” There was
an odd quality of banter in his voice. “I was thinking about murder!
There is a gentleman in this town who has made life rather difficult
for me, and I had just decided to walk up to him at the earliest
opportunity and pop three automatic bullets through his heart when you
disturbed the homicidal current of my thoughts.”

Coldwell chuckled.

“I thought I recognized you. You’re Peter Dawlish,” he said, and the
shabby figure lifted his hat with mock politeness.

“Such is fame!” he said sardonically. “And you are Coldwell: the
recognition is mutual! And now that I have hopelessly committed
myself, I presume you will call the nearest city policeman and put me
out of the way of all temptation.”

“When did you come out?” asked Coldwell.

The girl listened, staggered. They had been discussing this man not a
quarter of an hour before; she had spent the afternoon thinking of
him; and now to meet him on that wind-swept pavement, he of all the
millions of people in London, was something more than a coincidence.
It was fatalistic.

“Mr. Dawlish, I wonder if you will believe me when I say that you’re
the one man in London I was anxious to meet. I only knew to-day that
you were--out. Could you call and see me to-night?”

The man smiled.

“Invitations follow thick and fast,” he murmured. “Only ten minutes
ago I was asked into a Salvation Army shelter! Believe me, madam----”

“Mr. Dawlish”--her voice was very quiet, but very clear--“you are
being awfully sorry for yourself, aren’t you?”

She did not see the flush that came to his face.

“I suppose I am,” he said, a little gruffly. “But a man is
entitled----”

“A man is never entitled to be sorry for himself in any
circumstances,” she said. “Here is my card.”

She had slipped back the cover of her bag, and he took the little
pasteboard from her hand, and, bringing it close to his eyes, read, in
the dim light that a distant lamp afforded:


 Will you come and see me at half-past ten? I shan’t offer you money; I
 won’t even offer to find a job for you cutting wood or sorting waste
 paper. It is a very much bigger matter than that.


He read the name and subscription again, and his brows met.

“Oh, yes. Really--yes, if you wish.”

He was, of a sudden, awkward and uncomfortable. The girl was quick to
recognize the change in his manner and tone.

“I’m afraid I’m rather a scarecrow, but you won’t mind that?”

“No,” she said, and held out her hand.

He hesitated a second, then took it in his. She felt the hardness of
the palm, and winced at the significance of it. In another second she
had joined the waiting Coldwell. Peter Dawlish watched them until they
were out of sight, and then, with a little grimace, turned and walked
slowly toward Blackfriars.

“I knew about the smallness of the world,” said Coldwell, swinging his
umbrella, “but I had no idea that applied to London. Peter! It’s years
since I saw him last. He was rather a weed five years ago.”

“Do you think he really is a forger?”

“A jury of his fellow countrymen convicted him,” said Mr. Coldwell
cautiously, “and juries are generally right. After all, he needed the
money: his father was an old skinflint, and you cannot run a hectic
establishment, and escort pretty ladies to New York, on two hundred
and fifty pounds per annum. He was a fool; if he hadn’t taken that
three months’ holiday the forgery would never have been discovered.”

“Who was she?” Leslie asked; she felt that this question was called
for.

“I don’t know. The police _cher-chezed la femme_--forgive my mongrel
French--but they never ran her to earth. Peter said it was a chorus
girl from the Paris opera house. He wasn’t particularly proud of it.”

The girl sighed.

Near the dark entrance of Scotland Yard Mr. Coldwell stopped.

“Now,” he said, standing squarely before her, “perhaps you will cease
being mysterious, and tell me why you are so frantically interested in
Peter Dawlish that you have talked Peter Dawlish for the past three
days?”

She looked up at him steadily from under the lowered brim of her hat.

“Because I know just why Peter Dawlish wants to kill and whom he wants
to kill!” she said.

“Druze! A child would guess that!” scoffed the detective. “And he
wants to kill him because he thinks Druze’s evidence sent him to
jail.”

She was smiling--a broad smile of conscious triumph.

“Wrong!” she said. “If Druze dies, it will be because he doesn’t love
children!”

Mr. Coldwell could only gape at her.




 CHAPTER IV.
 PETER’S LODGINGS

“Let me get this right,” Coldwell said slowly. “Druze will be
killed--if he is killed--because he does not like children?”

Leslie Maughan nodded.

“I know you hate mysteries. Everybody in Scotland Yard does,” she
said; “and one day I will tell you just what I mean. Do you remember
last August you gave me a month’s vacation?”

Chief Inspector Coldwell remembered that very well.

“I went to Cumberland just to loaf around,” she said. “I was most
anxious to pretend that there wasn’t such a place in the world as
Scotland Yard. But I’ve got that prowling, inquisitive spirit that
would have made me the first woman inspector of the C.I.D. if the
commissioners were not such stuffy, old-fashioned gentlemen! One day I
was loafing through a little village, when I found something which
brought me eventually to this conclusion, that Druze doesn’t like
children. And one day, when he discovers the fact, Peter Dawlish will
kill him for it!”

“More mysterious than ever!” exclaimed Coldwell. “You’re probably
chasing a boojum. It is the fate of all enthusiastic young
officers--not that you’re an officer.”

Leslie Maughan had started her police career as a very junior
stenographer at Scotland Yard. Her father had been that famous
Assistant Commissioner Maughan whose exploits have formed the basis
for so many stories of police work, and he had left his daughter with
an income which put her above the necessity of working for her living.
But police investigation was in her blood, and she had graduated
through successive stages, until the authorities, reluctant to admit
that any woman had an executive position at police headquarters,
admitted her to the designation of “assistant” to the chief of the Big
Four.

“She’s brilliant; there’s no other word for her,” he had told the
chief commissioner. “And although I don’t think it’s much of a woman’s
job, there never was a woman who was better fitted to hold down a high
position at the Yard.”

“What are her chief qualifications?” asked the commissioner, slightly
amused.

“She thinks quick and she’s lucky,” was the comprehensive reply.

This question of luck exercised the mind of Leslie as she walked home
to her flat in the Charing Cross Road. The very fact that that
apartment was hers was strong support for the theory of luck. She had
taken a long lease of a floor above a moving-picture house at a time
when flats were going begging. She might have drawn double the rent
from a subtenant; but the place was central, comparatively cheap, and
she withstood all temptations to change her abode at a profit.

A side door led to the apartments, and she had hardly closed the door
behind her when a voice hailed her from the top of the stairs.

“That you, Miss Maughan?”

“That’s me,” said Leslie.

She hung her coat in the narrow hall and went upstairs to the girl who
was waiting on the landing. Lucretia Brown, her one servant, was a
very tall, broad-shouldered girl, with a round and not unpleasant
face. She stood now with her hands on her hips, surveying her
mistress.

“I thought you were----” she began.

“You thought I’d been murdered and thrown into the river,” said Leslie
good-humouredly. “As you always think if I am not back on the tick!”

“I don’t trust London,” said Lucretia.

It was her real name, chosen by a misguided farm labourer, who, having
heard a lecture on the Borgias, delivered at the parish hall, came
away with a vague idea that the historical character who bore that
name was a worthy creature.

“I never did trust London and I never will. Have you had dinner,
miss?”

“Yes, I’ve had my dinner,” said Leslie, and looked at the clock. “I am
expecting a man to call here at half-past ten, so, when you open the
door to him, please don’t tell him that I’m out and not expected back
for three weeks.”

Lucretia made a little face.

“Half-past ten’s a bit late for a gentleman visitor, miss. A friend of
yours?”

Leslie could never train her out of a personal interest in her
affairs. In a way Lucretia was privileged. Her first memory was of the
broad-faced Lucretia pushing a perambulator in which Leslie took the
air.

“Is it anybody we know, miss? Mr. Coldwell?”

Leslie shook her head.

“No,” she said, “he is a man who has just come out of prison.”

Lucretia closed her eyes and swayed.

“Good heavens!” she said in a hushed voice. “I never thought I’d live
to see the day when you’d be having a convict up to see you at
half-past ten at night! What about asking a policeman to stand by the
door, miss?”

“You’re much too partial to policemen,” said Leslie severely, and the
big maid grew incoherent in her indignant protests.

Half-past ten was striking from St. Martins-in-the-Fields when the
doorbell rang, and Lucretia came in to her, eyes big with excitement.

“That’s him!” she said melodramatically.

“Well, let him in.”

“Whatever happens,” began Lucretia, “I’m not responsible.”

Leslie pointed to the door. He came so lightly up the stairs that she
did not hear his steps. The door opened and Lucretia backed in.

“The gentleman,” she said loudly, and cast an apprehensive glance at
the stranger as she sidled out of the room and closed the door.

Peter Dawlish stood where Lucretia had left him, his soft hat in his
hand, glancing from the girl to the cosy room, a smile on his thin
face. She saw now how shabbily dressed he was: his shirt was
collarless, his boots gray with mud, the old, ill-fitting suit he wore
stained and patched.

“I warned you I was a scarecrow,” he said, as though he read her
thoughts. “They gave me a beautiful prison-made suit at Dartmoor, but
it didn’t seem the right kind of equipment with which to face a
censorious world, so I swapped it for this.”

She pushed a chair up to the fire.

“Sit down, won’t you, Mr. Dawlish?”

“‘Mr. Dawlish,’” he repeated. “That sounds terribly respectable.”

“You may smoke if you wish,” she said, as he seated himself slowly,
and again he smiled.

“I wish, but I have not the wherewithal.” She hastily opened a drawer
and took out a tin of cigarettes: “Thank you,” he said.

He took the cigarette in his fingers and frowned.

“That is certainly queer,” he said.

“What is certainly queer?” she asked.

“These gaspers; I used to smoke them in the old days. Had ’em imported
from Cairo. You can’t buy them here, at least you couldn’t when
I--retired. Heigho! Am I being very sorry for myself again? That
stung! I loathe these self-pitiers, and it was a revelation to
discover that I had gone over to the majority.”

He lit the cigarette and drew luxuriously.

“This is rather wonderful,” he said.

“Have you had any food?” she asked.

He nodded.

“I dined like a Sybarite, at a small shop in the Blackfriars Road. The
dinner cost sixpence; it was rather an extravagance, but I felt I
needed bracing for this ordeal.”

“You have no lodging?”

He shook his head.

“No, I have no lodging.”

He was twiddling his long, thin fingers. She noted with satisfaction
that his hands were scrupulously clean, and again he seemed to divine
her thoughts, for he looked down at them.

“I don’t exactly know what information I can give you, if it is
information you require, and if you had been a male-of-the-species
policeman I should have declined your invitation rather loftily! But a
woman policeman is unique. I’ve seen them, of course--rather fat
little bodies with squat little helmets. I suppose they’re useful.”

He noticed that she herself was not smoking, and commented upon it.

“No, I very rarely smoke,” she said. And then, in a changed tone: “Do
you mind if I speak very plainly?”

“The plainer the better,” he said, and he leaned back in his chair and
sent a cloud of smoke to the ceiling.

“I dare say you’ll be forced to walk London to-night?”

“It has become a habit,” said Peter Dawlish. “And really, it would be
rather amusing if one weren’t so horribly tired. They gave me a little
money when I left prison--not much. One gets quite a lot of sleep in
the daytime, especially the sunny days, in odd corners of the parks.
And on rainy nights I know a gardener’s tool house, which is not
perhaps to be compared with the bridal suite at an expensive hotel,
but is cosy. I slept there last night with an ex-colonel of infantry
and a lawyer who lived in the same ward at Dartmoor.”

She eyed him steadily.

“To-night you will sleep decently,” she said, in her quiet, even tone;
“and to-morrow you will buy a new suit of clothes and interview your
father.”

He raised his eyebrows, amusement in his eyes.

“I didn’t realize that you had scraped down to the family skeleton,”
he said. “And why am I to do this, Miss Maughan? The suit of clothes
would be a waste of money; my parent would not be impressed by my
appearance of affluence. Rather he would imagine that I had found
another good-natured gentleman who trusted me with his check book.
Furthermore, all this would cost money; and I think you should know,
before we go any further, that I am not taking any money from you on
any pretext.”

She had the extraordinary knack of making him feel foolish. He always
remembered afterward that in the first two meetings with this strange
girl he had gone hot and cold either at her words or the inflection of
her voice.

“That kind of pride which refuses to take money from a woman is very
admirable.” There was a note of cold sarcasm in her voice which made
him writhe. “It is the attitude of mind behind man’s subconscious
sense of superiority to the female of the species! It is not
particularly flattering to a woman, but it must be immensely
gratifying to a man! May I ask you another question, Mr. Peter
Dawlish? Do you intend sinking down into the dregs? Is your vista of
life lined on either side by common lodging houses, with a pauper’s
graveyard at the end of it?”

“I don’t exactly see what you’re driving at.”

She had made him angry and was secretly amused.

“I shall do my best, naturally, to find work. I had an idea of going
abroad.”

“Exactly.” She nodded. “To one of the colonies. It is the most popular
of all delusions that people without grit or ambition can magically
acquire these qualities the moment they go ashore at Quebec or Sydney,
or wherever their high spirits lead them.”

He was laughing now in spite of himself.

“You’ve certainly got a knack of riling a man.”

“Haven’t I?” she put in. “I’ll tell you what I was driving at, Mr.
Dawlish. For you to refuse a loan of money now suggests that you’re
perfectly satisfied in your mind that you will never earn enough to
repay the loan. The only way you can justify a refusal of money is to
believe that you can never pay it back; that you’re going to belong to
the bread lines and the park benches and the public charities.”

She saw that her shaft had got home, and went on quickly:

“Of course you will do nothing of the sort! You’ve come out of prison
with a grievance against the world, and you’re hardly to be blamed for
that. I should imagine you are one of the few innocent men who ever
went to Dartmoor.”

He looked at her shrewdly.

“You believe I was innocent?”

She nodded.

“I’m pretty sure,” she said, and then: “Do you carry a gun?”

He laughed aloud.

“The price of a Browning pistol would keep me in luxury for two
months,” he said. “No, I carry nothing more dangerous than a
toothbrush.”

The drawer from which she had taken the cigarettes was still open; she
put in her hand and took out a small black cash box, and jerked back
the lid.

“We will do this thing in a businesslike way,” she said. “You will
find a paper and pencil on the desk; sign an IOU for twenty pounds. If
you believe in your heart of hearts that you’ll be unable to pay me
back, that a man of twenty-nine or twenty-eight, or whatever age you
are, will never earn a sufficient margin above his cost of living to
send back that money in a year or two years, then you need not take a
cent. And this little bit of charity, as you call it----”

“I’ve called it nothing of the sort.”

“In your mind you have,” she said calmly. “It is very rude to
contradict a lady! Now, Mr. Dawlish, I challenge you! If you think you
are permanently down and out, the incident is finished, and I think
you’re finished, too.”

She looked at him through her half-closed eyes, nodding slowly.

“You mean I’m not worth salving?” he asked, and got up. “I’ll accept
your challenge.”

He took the pencil, scribbled a few words on the writing pad, and,
tearing it off, handed it to the girl.

“Produce your twenty pounds.”

He was amused in a sour way, but his anger was mostly directed inward
to himself, that he should be angry at all. If anybody had told him,
when he had walked into that room, that he would accept a loan of
money from the girl who had not been absent from his thoughts since he
had met her, he would have laughed at such a suggestion. Yet here he
was, counting solemnly the notes as they were handed to him, and
pocketing them without one single qualm of conscience.

“I think I’m beginning to know myself,” he said. “I started a
weakling, and prison hasn’t improved me. No, no, I do not mean that it
is a weakness to accept this money, but it would have been a weakness
to refuse. I’m awfully obliged to you.”

She held out her hand.

“Where will you be staying?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But I will keep in touch with you. Please don’t bother
about me any more. If I can’t get a job of some kind, I’m really not
worth helping. Why are you doing this? It isn’t part of the usual
police procedure.”

She shook her head.

“The police help where they can, you ought to know that,” she said
quietly. “But I admit that this is a purely personal action on my
part. You are part of a big experiment. It isn’t my womanly heart, but
my scientific brain that is dictating just now.” And then, going off
at a tangent: “I wish you would shave yourself, Mr. Dawlish. You look
too much like a musical genius to be thoroughly wholesome.”

He was still chuckling to himself when Lucretia closed the outer door
upon him with unnecessary violence.

He knew a small temperance hotel where he could sleep that night, a
place in Lambeth, near Waterloo Station. “Temperance hotel” was rather
a grand name for an establishment which was only a little superior to
a common lodging house, but he guessed it was too late to get a bed at
any of the Rowton houses.

He walked briskly down Charing Cross Road and into the Strand, crowded
with cars and taxis, for the theatres were closing and the northern
sidewalk was almost impassable. And then he thought he saw his mother
preceding another lady into a car, and stopped. Yes, it was Margaret
Dawlish, and the lady with the dirty-gray hair was Aunt Anita. He
could afford to grin now, and the discovery was very pleasurable. He
could well imagine that if he had seen that party earlier in the
evening, the sight would have evoked a sneer and just that twinge of
self-pity against which he was trying hard to guard himself.

He turned back, lest in passing they recognize him, and went down
Villiers Street, mounting the stairs to Hungerford Bridge. It was not
the twenty notes in his pocket, a compact, cosy little roll, that made
his heart and his step lighter; he had caught something of the girl’s
spirit, had been imbued with a little of her courage and sanity.

Leslie Maughan puzzled him. She was more than pretty; there was in her
face a spirituality which he had not detected in the face of any woman
of his acquaintance or knowledge. He realized with a start that he had
always disliked clever women. He liked them soft and feminine, and, if
the truth be told, a little silly. But he liked this capable and
pretty young woman.

Leslie Maughan had just enough of the official quality to keep him at
a distance, and yet she was genuinely friendly, as friendly as a
sensible elder sister might be, though in truth she must be years
younger than he. Sometimes he felt a very old man; Leslie Maughan had
made him feel like a child.

He was over the middle of the river now, and there was revealed to him
the pageantry of the Embankment, with its lights reflected in the dark
waters of the Thames. He felt himself responding to the glow and
colour of it. And then, for no reason at all, he had an uncomfortable
feeling that he could not trace, but instinctively he looked back.
There were several people crossing with him, but immediately behind
him, not half a dozen yards away, were three little men who moved
shoulder to shoulder. They had the curious high-stepping walk which he
had seen in Orientals, a sort of modified prance. They were not
speaking to one another, as friends might who were walking home
together, and, curiously enough, it was their silence which made him
uneasy. Five years in a penal establishment had not been a good nerve
cure for a man of Peter Dawlish’s temperament.

He ran down the steps and found himself in a dim and gloomy street.
From here was a short cut to the York Road, near where his temperance
hotel was situated. His way led him through a deserted street of tiny
houses, that was not quite a slum, but was barely respectable. As he
turned into the thoroughfare, he glanced back and saw that the three
little men were following. They moved noiselessly, as though they were
wearing rubber shoes. Peter crossed the road and they followed a
little nearer to him.

He was wondering whether it would not be better to turn and face them
till they had passed. He had decided upon this action, when something
fell over his head. He raised his hand quickly to catch at the thin
rope, but it was too late. The slip knot tightened about his throat,
two muscular little figures leaped at him, and in another second he
was lying on the ground, fighting for life, strangled, his head
bursting, his hands clawing at the rope. And then consciousness left
him. After an eternity he felt somebody lifting him up and propping
him against a wall; a brilliant light shone on his face.

Peter put his hand to his throat; the rope had gone, but he could
still feel the deep depression it had made upon his skin.

“What was the game?” said a gruff voice.

He blinked up, could distinguish a helmeted head--a policeman.

“How do you feel? Would you like me to get an ambulance? I can put you
into the hospital in a minute.”

Shaking in every limb, Peter struggled to his feet.

“I’m all right,” he said unsteadily. “Who were they?”

The policeman shook his head.

“I don’t know. They passed me at the end of the street, and I thought
they looked queer. Little fellows with flat noses; more like monkeys
than men. And then I saw them go for you and came after them. I think
I just about saved your life, young fellow.”

“I think you did,” said Peter ruefully, as he felt at his scarred
throat.

“Run! I never saw anybody run as fast as they did,” said the
constable. “Did you have a row with them?”

“No, I never saw them before in my life,” said Peter.

“Humph!” The officer was looking at him dubiously. “Wonder who they
were? They talked in some lingo I didn’t understand. I only caught one
word, or maybe it’s two--orange pander or bander.”

“_Orang blanga?_” asked Peter quickly, and whistled.

“Know ’em?”

Peter shook his head.

“No, I don’t know them. I guess their nationality. Javanese.”

The officer was loath to leave him.

“Where are you going now?”

“I’m trying to find a lodging.”

He was still far from recovered, for when he took a step the street
and the officer went round in a mad whirl, and but for the policeman’s
arm he would have fallen.

“You’ll get yourself pinched for being drunk,” said the policeman
humorously. “Lodgings? Now where did I see a lodging?”

He switched on his light, walked slowly down the street, flashing the
lamp upon the windows. Presently he stopped.

“Here you are,” he said.

Peter made a slow and cautious way to where the policeman was
standing. The lantern was focused upon a little card in the window:


 Lodgings for a Respectable Young Man.


“Will this do for you?”

Peter nodded, and the constable rapped gently on the door. He had to
wait some time, but presently there was a heavy foot in the passage
and a woman’s voice asked hoarsely:

“It’s all right, missis,” said the custodian of the law. “I’m a
policeman; there’s a gentleman here who wants lodging.”

The door was unlocked and opened a few inches.

“I’ve got a room, yes, but it’s a bit late, ain’t it?”

The constable uttered an exclamation of surprise.

“Why, bless me, it’s Mrs. Inglethorne!”

“Yes, it’s Mrs. Inglethorne,” repeated the woman bitterly. “And well
you ought to know, considering the trouble you police have brought on
me! My old man being as innocent as a babe unborn, and our lodger as
nice a young man as ever drew the breath of life!”

She peered at Peter in the reflection from the policeman’s light; he
saw a bloated red face, a loose mouth, and eyes of singular smallness.
She was short and stout and wore a red flannel dressing gown, though
apparently she had not disrobed for the night.

“I can’t take you unless you’ve got money,” she said. “I’ve been done
before.”

Peter skinned a pound from the roll and showed it to her.

“All right, come in,” she said ungraciously.

Stopping only to thank the policeman for his help, Peter followed her
into the narrow, evil-smelling passage, and the door closed behind
him.

Fate had played its supreme joke on Peter Dawlish when it had led him
to the unsavoury home of Mrs. Inglethorne.

She struck a match, lit a smelly little oil lamp, and preceded him up
a steep, short flight of stairs to the floor above.

“Here’s the room,” she said, and he followed her into the front and
the best bedroom in the house.

To his surprise, it was fairly well furnished: the bed was a new one,
the walls had been lately papered; the two cheap engravings which
constituted the pictorial embellishment of the apartment were in good
taste.

“This was my lodger’s room. He furnished it himself,” said Mrs.
Inglethorne rapidly. “As nice a man as ever drew the breath of life.”
She pronounced the last sentence so quickly that it almost seemed to
be one word.

“Has he left you?”

She glanced at him suspiciously as though she thought that he was
already informed as to the lodger’s fate.

“He’s got five years for busting a house up at Blackheath. My old man
got seven, and an honester man there never was!”

A grim jest this, thought Peter Dawlish, that he, newly from that drab
and drear establishment on Dartmoor, should be offered the vacant
bedroom of one who had taken his place, was probably in the very cell
in B Ward he had occupied.

“Pay in advance; eight shillings. I’ll give you the change to-morrow.”
Mrs. Inglethorne held out her hand. In the light of the lamp she was
even more unprepossessing than Peter had thought.

He gathered from certain evidence that prohibition would find no
vigorous supporter in her. She took the money he gave her, and,
setting down the lamp, opened a chest and extracted two new sheets.
Evidently, thought Peter, as he watched the process of bed making, the
burglar lodger was fastidious in the matter of comfort: the sheets
were of linen. He discovered later that the pillows were of down, and
that the bed itself was a luxurious article purchased at great cost in
Tottenham Court Road.

“He liked everything of the best,” said Mrs. Inglethorne, pausing in
her labours to extol the absent tenant.

She went out soon after, leaving behind her a faint odour of
spirituous liquor. He undressed slowly by the light of the lamp,
preparing for the first good night’s sleep he had had in a week.

The bed was soft, too soft. Although he was desperately tired, he
tossed from side to side in a vain endeavour to sleep. It must have
been two hours before he dozed, and then he woke.

It was a shrill, thin cry that woke him, and he sat up in bed,
listening. It came again, from somewhere downstairs. It was a cat, he
thought; no human voice was capable of such an attenuation of sound.

Again the cry! He got out of bed, walked to the door, opened it, and
bent his head, listening. And then the hair of his head rose. It was a
child’s sobs he heard, and then a voice:

“I want my daddy! I want my daddy!”

He heard Mrs. Inglethorne’s growling voice, as if she had been wakened
from sleep.

“Shut up, blast you! If I get up to you I’ll break your neck!”

And then the voices ceased, and Peter went back to bed. But it was not
until the sound of closing doors in the street told him that the early
workers were abroad, that he fell into a troubled sleep, disturbed by
dreams of a child who cried and moaned all the time: “I want my daddy!
I want my daddy!”




 CHAPTER V.
 A DEAD MAN

Leslie received a letter on the following afternoon,
when she came back from her office.


                                       104 Severall Street, Lambeth.

 Dear Miss Maughan: I have lodgings at the above address, and in
 spite of the neighbourhood they are very comfortable, though my
 landlady is certainly the most unprepossessing female. There are six
 children in the house, ranging from a few months to a little girl of
 eight years. So, whatever are her faults, Mrs. Inglethorne--who drinks
 gin and has the fiery face of a Betsey Prig--has served her country
 most prolifically! I am buying some new clothes and hope to report, in
 a few days, that I am riding upward on a tide of prosperity.


What Mr. Coldwell called “The Dawlish Case,” but which she thought
about under quite another title, was completely occupying the girl’s
mind. It was her first big case in the sense that never before had the
wheels of investigation moved of her own volition.

There had been more spectacular events with which she had been
associated. She had helped Coldwell in the Kent Tunnel murder; it was
her quick mind which had first grasped the fact that the principal
informant of the police knew too much about the tragedy for one who
had not participated in the crime. She it was who, searching the
contents of a prisoner’s pocket, had found the stain of indelible ink
upon a silver coin, and had built upon that slender clue the theory
which led to the arrest of the Flack Gang, and the capture of the
plant with which they had been flooding Europe with forged
one-thousand-franc notes.

She brought to police work the keenest of woman’s wits and a queer
instinct for ultimate causes that sometimes amazed and sometimes
amused headquarters.

And now she was building up a new fabric, but, as she realized, on the
shakiest of foundations--a little book of verse found in a Cumberland
cottage.

She took it down from her shelf, a thin volume of Elizabeth Browning’s
poems. On the flyleaf was an inscription and eight lines of writing in
a neat hand. A stanza of free verse, and not especially good free
verse. She read it for the fiftieth time:


 Do you recall
 One dusky night in June
 Over by Harrlow Copse,
 Heart of my heart?
 Ecstasy lay on your lips,
 Nectar of gods was your gift--
 All in “the kiss of one girl”
 Joy and despair.


The writer was no poet. Even as a writer of _vers libre_ his effort
left something to be desired.

She put away the book, returned to her desk, and sat for half an hour,
her chin in her hands, her eyes fixed vacantly on the opposite wall.
For the moment Peter Dawlish was off her hands, and though he came
back again and again to her thoughts, it was not in the rôle of a
responsibility.

She took from a drawer the tin of cigarettes she had offered him on
the previous night, and examined it absently. She had searched London
for this brand of Egyptian cigarettes, and in the end had found them
in the last place in the world she expected--Scotland Yard. The chief
commissioner, an old Egyptian officer, imported them for his own use.

She closed the lid, found an envelope, and addressing it to “Peter
Dawlish, Esq., 104 Severall Street, London,” she inclosed the
cigarettes. It was nearly dark when Lucretia brought in her tea.

“You’re not going out again to-night, miss, are you?” When Leslie
replied in the affirmative: “What about taking me with you, Miss
Leslie?”

Leslie did not laugh.

“Somehow I can’t see you in the setting of a night club, Lucretia,”
she said.

“I could stay outside,” insisted Lucretia stoutly. “Anyway, I’d never
dream of going into a night club after what the papers say about ’em.
I saw a party getting out of a car the other night--ladies! Why, miss,
I could have carried all their dresses in a little bag! Disgraceful, I
call it!”

Leslie laughed quietly.

“You’ve got to understand, Lucretia,” she said, “that no woman is
properly dressed for dinner unless she feels comfortably nude. Don’t
faint!”

“Women are not what they was,” said Lucretia severely.

“That’s the devil of it, Lucretia. They are!” said Leslie.

She had only half made up her mind as to the course she should pursue.
Mr. Coldwell often twitted her about her luck, but her “luck” was
largely a matter of abnormal instinct, and it was in her bones that
there was tragedy in the air. Suppose she saw Lady Raytham again, and
this time spoke not in parables, but in plain English? It required no
particular effort on Leslie’s part, for her moral equipment was free
from the faintest tinge of cowardice. She had inquired that morning as
to whether Lady Raytham had carried her threat into execution and had
written to the chief commissioner, but apparently her ladyship had
reconsidered her decision. Had Peter Dawlish told her of the attack
which had been made upon him, and which had so surprisingly led him to
Mrs. Inglethorne, she would have called at Berkeley Square before
then. But Peter had been silent on the subject, and Leslie did not
know till the next day of that surprising outrage.

She went to her bedroom and changed her dress; she was dining that
night with Mr. Coldwell at the Ambassadors, which is sometimes called
a night club by the uninitiated, but is in reality the centre of
London’s smart life. Over her flimsy gown, which Lucretia never saw
without closing her eyes in mental anguish, she put on her heavy fur
coat, slipped a pair of rubbers over her shoes, and sent Lucretia down
for a taxi. At a quarter past seven she was pressing the visitors’
bell at No. 377 Berkeley Square. The door was opened almost instantly
by a footman.

“Have you an appointment with her ladyship?” he asked, as he closed
the door upon her.

“No, she hasn’t an appointment with her ladyship.”

Leslie turned in amazement at the sound of a loud, raucous voice. It
was Druze, who had come into the hall from a door beneath the stairs.
The white face was red and blotchy; his hair untidy; there was a stain
on his white shirt front, and when he walked toward her his step was
unsteady. He was, in point of fact, rather drunk, and Mr. Druze drunk
was an exceedingly different person from Mr. Druze sober.

The whole character of the man seemed to have changed. From being a
shrinking, rather fearful servitor, he had become a blustering,
loud-mouthed bully of a man.

“You can get out. Go on! We don’t want you!”

He advanced toward her threateningly, but the girl did not move. The
second footman had withdrawn to a respectful distance and was looking
with frowning amusement at the antics of his chief.

“Do you hear what I say? Clear out! We don’t want any spying police
girls round here.”

It looked as though he would use physical force to eject her, but his
hand had hardly been raised when she said something in a low
voice--one word. The big white hand went down; the blotchy red went
out of his face, and he blinked at her like a man who was trying to
swallow something that would not be swallowed. And then, looking up,
she saw a resplendent figure at the head of the stairs. It was Lady
Raytham.

“Come up, please.”

The voice was hard and metallic. There was neither cordiality nor
welcome in it, nor did Leslie expect any such demonstration. She
mounted the stairs, but before she could reach the landing Lady
Raytham had turned and preceded her into the drawing room. As she went
in, she saw that her unwilling hostess was not alone. Before the fire
stood a figure which was not wholly unfamiliar--a square, tall,
Eton-cropped figure with a monocle, which fixed her with a keen and
penetrating glance.

The contrast between the two women was startling. Lady Raytham had
never looked more lovely, more fragile, Leslie thought, than she did
at that moment. She also was going out to dinner, and she wore a dress
of old gold, and about her neck a magnificent chain of emeralds that
terminated in a square emerald pendant which must have been worth a
fortune. Anita Bellini was in scarlet, a hard, shrieking scarlet that
no other woman could have worn. And yet, for some remarkable reason,
it suited her. The _godet_ was of silver lace, decorated by big green
and red stones and the thick jade bracelets and ruby necklet gave her
an air of barbaric splendour.

“I am sorry you came, Miss Maughan; it is doubly unfortunate. If Druze
had been normal, I should have sent you away without seeing you. As it
is, I feel that at least an apology is due to you for the disgraceful
condition of my servant.”

Leslie inclined her head slightly. What she had to say could not be
told before this big, steely-eyed woman who stood with her back to the
fire, the inevitable cigarette between her lips, the shining eyeglass
fixed upon the visitor.

“I wanted to see you alone if I could, Lady Raytham.”

Jane Raytham shook her head.

“There is nothing you can tell me that I should not wish Princess
Bellini to hear,” she said.

Without turning her head, Anita flicked her cigarette ash into the
fireplace.

“Perhaps Miss Maughan doesn’t wish to speak before a witness,” she
said, in her hard, deep voice. “If I were Lady Raytham I should have
reported you last night to your superiors and had you kicked out of
Scotland Yard!”

Leslie smiled faintly.

“If you were Lady Raytham, there are so many things you would do,
Princess,” she said, “and there would be so many things that it would
be quite unnecessary for you to do!”

Anita’s eyes did not waver.

“Such as----” she suggested.

If she expected to frighten the younger woman she must have been
disappointed. Leslie’s lips were curved in a fixed smile.

“We have now come to the point,” she said good-humouredly, “where I
should not like to speak before witnesses, either--though some day I
may speak before more witnesses than you can crowd into a room twice
this size; as many, Princess, as can squeeze themselves into Court No.
1 at the Old Bailey.”

She said this without raising her voice, and now for the first time
Anita Bellini gave the slightest hint of her emotion. The eyeglass
dropped and was caught deftly and replaced with too-elaborate care.
The strong mouth drooped a little, but recovered at once.

“That sounds almost like a threat to me,” she said harshly. “Young
lady, I think you’re going to lose a job.”

Quick as a flash came the answer:

“Before I lose my job, Princess, you will lose a very profitable
source of income.”

She did not wait for the answer, but turned to Lady Raytham.

“Will you see me alone, Lady Raytham?”

Jane Raytham’s voice shook a little; she was a very bewildered woman.

“I brought you here to apologize to you for Druze,” she said
breathlessly, “and you have made use of the opportunity to insult my
friend--a lady who----”

Her voice grew husky and she stopped as though she could not
articulate further.

There was nothing more to be gained here, unless she was prepared to
blurt her questions before the very woman who she was anxious should
remain in ignorance of the information which had come to her. Leslie
had unfastened her coat in coming upstairs; behind her brown fur Lady
Raytham saw the silk-clad figure in mauve. Princess Anita Bellini
smiled. She had a flair for Paris models.

“They pay you well in the police, my young friend,” she said bluntly.
“Who is the lucky gentleman who pays for your clothes?”

“My lawyer until I am twenty-five,” said Leslie.

“Fortunate lawyer! Who is he?”

Leslie smiled.

“You ought to know him. He acted for you in your bankruptcy.”

And with that parting shot she went out of the room, knowing she was a
cat, but realizing that a cat was entitled to what pleasure she might
find in getting under the skin of a tigress.


Half an hour later, Mr. Coldwell unfolded his serviette and shook his
head soberly.

“You _are_ a cat, too! But you’re a clever little cat; and when,
Tabitha, did you discover that her highness was a bankrupt? I confess
that is news to me.”

The girl laughed ruefully.

“I read gazettes,” she said. “It is depraved in me, but I find them
more interesting than the best sex novel that any school girl has ever
written! The bankruptcy was arranged ten years ago in the quietest
way. The princess took up her residence in a small country town before
she filed her petition, and it is easy to keep these country
proceedings out of the London papers. On this occasion she described
herself as Mrs. Bellini. There is no law compelling you to use a
foreign title.”

“Pussy cat, pussy cat,” murmured Mr. Coldwell. “And did she annihilate
you?”

“She was slightly withering,” said Leslie carelessly. “But Druze
dropped! I’m awfully worried about that.”

“I don’t see why you should be,” said Coldwell, and beckoned a waiter.

When the man had taken the order:

“Do you know, you’re almost persuading me that there is something big
behind this Dawlish mystery? I don’t mean the discovery, which is very
unlikely to be made, that Druze was the forger after all.”

A tall woman had come into the restaurant and was glaring round
through the thick lenses of her horn-rimmed spectacles. She was very
straight and spare, her head covered with a mop of white hair, which
lent her an almost comical air of ferocity. She nodded curtly to the
inspector and went to meet the gesticulating maître d’hôtel.

“That is mamma,” said Coldwell.

“Mamma? Whose mamma?”

“Your interesting convict’s.”

“Margaret Dawlish?” Leslie opened her eyes in astonishment. “This is
the last place I should have expected to see her.”

“She dines here every night,” said Coldwell. “I have a good idea why.”

Leslie looked at Peter’s mother again; the square jaw, the thin lips,
the deep eyes, all fulfilled the mental picture she had made of her.

“If you weren’t here, do you know what I should do?” she asked at
last.

“Whatever it is, don’t!” said Coldwell apprehensively.

His relationship with Leslie was a curious one. In the old days of
Commissioner Maughan he had been the colonel’s chief assistant; though
he was only a sergeant in those days, he was admitted very largely to
the confidence of that genius of Scotland Yard; spent long week-ends
at Sutton Cawley, and had assumed a sort of guardianship toward
Colonel Maughan’s motherless child. There never was a time within
Leslie’s recollection that Josiah Coldwell had not figured largely in
her life. He was one of her father’s executors, the best trusted of
all his friends, and it was only natural, when she conceived the idea
of adopting police work as a profession, that he should be her
sponsor.

It was not until a very long time after she had put the suggestion to
him that he agreed. At first he had pooh-poohed, then he had grown
solemn, and then mournful; but in the end she had had her way.

“If you don’t put me there, Uncle Josiah, I shall go into training as
a private detective!”

It only needed this threat to force his capitulation, for private
detectives were contemptible figures in the eyes of this regular
policeman. For him it was a matter of pride that she had succeeded.
To-day, if the truth be told, if she had expressed the slightest hint
of weariness and a desire to return to the obscurity of what is termed
“civilian life,” he would have been thrust in the deeps of gloom.

He did not tell her this in the course of the dinner. She had guessed
it easily enough long before, but he did venture to return to a matter
which rather worried him. As the band struck up a dance tune and she
rose invitingly, he groaned and came to his feet.

“I’ll be awfully glad, Leslie, when you find a young man to dance
these infernal jazzes with you. How can you expect the high-class
crooks of London to have any respect for a man who dances in public?”

He was over sixty, yet, in truth, no better dancer took the floor that
night. But it pleased him to talk of his decrepitude.

“I’m not made right,” said Leslie, as he guided her through the
dancers who crowded the floor. “Young men have no appeal for me
whatever.”

Mr. Coldwell peered down at her.

“Are you going to be one of those love-is-not-for-me girls?” he asked
gloomily. “Somehow I can’t imagine you running a garage of toy poms.”

Leslie’s eyes roved around the room, and presently they rested upon
Margaret Dawlish; hard-faced, inflexible, the type of Roman mother who
could never forgive the humiliation that Peter had brought upon her.
How queer was the average man’s conception of the average woman! The
conventional mother, soft, yielding, ready to endure all and forgive
all for the sake of her children, was no figment of imagination, but
the throw-outs were innumerable. Leslie started to count all the
instances she knew, and grew tired of the exercise. She had witnessed,
incredible though it might seem, a mother dancing on this very floor
while her child was dying in a nursing home a few streets away.

She knew mothers who could not speak of their daughters without
growing incoherent with rage. And this was the fourth instance of a
mother who could sweep her only son out of memory, out of existence,
for some offence he had committed, not against her, but against
society. Margaret Dawlish sat alone at a little table, very upright,
very forbidding, and when the maître d’hôtel, in the manner of his
kind, approached her with a smile, she dismissed him with a few words,
and, raising her lorgnette, made an inspection of the dancers.

“That woman is granite,” said Leslie, as the band stopped and they
walked back to their table.

“Which? You mean Mrs. Dawlish? Yes. I rather think she is on the hard
side. That sort of thing meant a lot to her. She hates this company
and this place, but for five years, ever since her son was sent to
prison, she has made a point of dining here.”

Leslie nodded.

“A gesture of defiance! Gosh! These respectable people! They dare not
leave a room for fear somebody talks behind their backs!”

It was toward eleven o’clock, and Coldwell had summoned the waiter to
pay his bill, when a footman came from the vestibule and, bending
over, whispered something to him.

“A phone message; I expect it’s from the Embankment,” he said. “Excuse
me, Leslie.”

He threaded a way through the dancers on the floor, and was gone ten
minutes. When he came back, she saw his white eyebrows were met in a
frown.

“The Kingston police think they’ve got a line to those infernal
motor-car bandits,” he said.

He referred to a gang which was occupying the public attention at that
time--three men who, in hired or stolen motor cars, had been
travelling through Surrey, holding up isolated residences at the point
of a pistol, and getting away with as much portable property as they
could lay their hands upon.

“I’ll see you home,” he said as he paid the bill, “and then I’ll
toddle down to Kingston. I wish to heaven the Kingston police would
make their discoveries at a reasonable hour.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’m not a bit sleepy, and it’s a braw
bricht moonlicht nicht!”

He looked at her dubiously.

“I don’t know that you’re dressed for a motor-car journey, but if you
wish you can come along. I have phoned for the police car; it will be
here in a few minutes.”

She went out into the lobby to put on the woollen spencer she had
brought in preparation for a cold journey home, and over that her
coat. It was true that she never felt less like sleep; in a sense, she
was at a loose end, and the prospect of doing a little work before she
went to bed was a pleasing one, though in all probability she would
play no other part than that of spectator and audience.

The trip promised to be the more interesting, because she had, that
day, been tracing the previous convictions of three men who were
suspected of being the motor bandits--and very commonplace individuals
they were. That had been the most shocking discovery she made when she
came to Scotland Yard--the commonplaceness, indeed the insignificance,
of what it described as the criminal class. Out-of-work plumbers,
labourers, carters, and clerks, with a painter here and there, formed
the bulk of them. The women only had an individuality. There was no
habitual woman criminal quite untouched by romance; their stories were
altogether different, their lives more varied, and, if the truth be
told, their enterprise and inventive qualities more fascinating.

She passed through the swing doors into the street. The night was
bitterly cold and the sky overhead was clear. The bright moon which
she had recklessly inferred was not in evidence, but there were all
the other attractive conditions for a midnight ride.

The car was an open tourer with a plenitude of rugs, and as Mr.
Coldwell fixed the rear screen to shield her face from the cutting
air, the journey promised no discomforts. The car passed swiftly
through Kensington and across Hammersmith Bridge, and in an incredibly
short space of time was running down Kingston Vale. The driver pulled
up at the police station behind a big touring car which was
unattended, and they got down.

In the charge room they found the inspector talking to a middle-aged
man who was apparently the owner of the car.

“Sorry to bring you down, Mr. Coldwell,” said the inspector, “but this
sounds almost like one of the motor crowd’s little jokes.”

The car owner apparently was the proprietor of a small garage. That
afternoon he had been approached by a seemingly decent man, who asked
him if he would come to London with the idea of negotiating for an
important journey. The garage keeper, as it happened, had some
business in town and had met the hirer at a little restaurant in the
Brompton Road.

“He seemed all right to me,” the garage keeper continued his
narrative. “It was only after I got home that I began to smell a rat.
He wanted me to pick him up at the end of Barnes Common, near the
Wimbledon Road, at a quarter past ten to-night, and drive him to
Southampton. He asked for a closed car, but I told him I hadn’t got
one that could do the journey, and I didn’t like the idea, anyway. But
as he offered me double the fare I should have asked, and paid half of
it down, I agreed.”

“Did you ask him why he wanted to go to Southampton at a quarter past
ten?”

“That was the first question I asked,” said the man. “He told me he
was dining with some friends, and that that would mean he would lose
the boat train--the _Berengaria_ pulls out at five o’clock to-morrow
morning, and all the passengers must be on the ship overnight. I’ve
had that job before, so it wasn’t unusual. The only queer thing about
it was that, instead of asking me to pick him up at a house, he fixed
this place on Barnes Common. But he told me he didn’t want his friends
to know that he was leaving the next day. At any rate, I fell for him,
but as time went on I began to get suspicious and communicated with
the police.”

“What sort of looking man was he?” asked Leslie.

“A middle-aged man, miss,” said the chauffeur-owner, a little
surprised at a question from this quarter. “It struck me that he’d
been booz--drinking a little, but that’s neither here nor there. He
was well dressed, and that’s all I can tell you about him except that
he was clean-shaven, had rather a big face, and wore a soft felt hat.”

Coldwell turned to the girl.

“Does that describe any of the people we have been looking over?” he
asked.

She shook her head.

“No,” she said quietly, “but it rather accurately describes Druze!”

“Druze?” he said incredulously. “You’re not suggesting that Druze is
one of the gang?”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” she said, biting her lip thoughtfully.
“Did you notice his hands, Mr.----”

“Porter,” said the chauffeur. “Yes, miss, I did notice his hands when
he took off his gloves to pay me. They were very white.”

She looked at Coldwell.

“That is an even more accurate description,” she said.

“You didn’t go to the Common, did you?” asked Coldwell.

“No, sir. The inspector went up in my car with a couple of policemen.”

“He must have smelled a rat,” said the local inspector. “There was no
sign of anybody at a quarter past ten, and apparently he was very
particular about his being there absolutely on time. He told Mr.
Porter: ‘If I’m not there by twenty-five minutes past, don’t wait for
me.’ That sounds rather like the gang, Mr. Coldwell,” he added. “It is
an old trick of theirs to hire a car and arrange to be picked up in
some quiet spot----”

The telephone bell tinkled in another room and he went to the
instrument. He was gone five minutes. When he came back:

“The gang ‘busted’ a house the other side of Guilford at nine
o’clock,” he said. “The car smashed into a ditch and two of them have
been caught by the Surrey police.”

Coldwell pursed his lips.

“That disposes of your theory,” he said.

Driving back up Kingston Vale, Coldwell expatiated upon his favourite
theme, which might be headed, “No effort is wasted when you’re dealing
with law-breakers.”

“A lot of men would grouse about being brought out in the middle of
the night on a fool’s errand, but it isn’t possible to investigate the
reason why a condensed milk tin has been found in an ashpit without
learning something valuable. And if that hirer was friend Druze----”

“As it was,” said Leslie promptly.

“Well, we’ve learned something,” continued Coldwell. “It brings him
into a new list, so to speak. He’s in the people-who-do-strange-things
class, and that makes him stand out from the mass of law-abiding
citizens.”

They passed swiftly down Roehampton Lane, climbed the little slope
that carried them over the railway bridge, and had reached the middle
of the Common when Chief Inspector Coldwell began to enlarge and
illustrate his theory. Just ahead of them, Leslie saw the rear lights
of a car moving out from the side of the road.

“Never despise little cases,” he began, “because----”

There was a grinding of brakes; the car stopped so violently that
Leslie’s nose touched the glass screen painfully.

“What’s wrong?” asked Coldwell sharply. He, too, had seen the car
ahead, and his first thought was that his driver was avoiding a
collision.

The police chauffeur was looking round.

“I’m sorry, sir, I was rather startled. Did you see a man lying on the
sidewalk?”

“No, where?” asked the interested Coldwell.

The driver reversed and the car moved slowly backward. They saw a
black something in the darkness, and then, as the machine moved back a
few more feet, the headlamps showed the figure of a man.

Coldwell got down from the car slowly.

“It looks like a drunk,” he mumbled. “You’d better stay where you are,
Leslie.”

But his foot had hardly touched the ground before she had followed.

Well enough Inspector Coldwell knew that this was no drunk. The
attitude, the outstretched arms, the legs slightly doubled, told him,
before he saw the little pool of crimson on the sidewalk, that there
was no life here.

For a second the two stood gazing down at the pitiable figure.

“Druze,” said the girl quietly. “Somehow I expected it.”

It was Druze, and he was dead. The heavy overcoat was buttoned across
his chest; there was no sign of a hat, and his hands, ungloved, were
tightly clenched. As she looked, Leslie saw a queer green glitter in
the light of the motor lamps.

“He has something in his left hand,” she said in a hushed voice, and,
kneeling down, Inspector Coldwell pried loose the fingers, and the
thing that the dead man held fell with a tinkle to the gravelled path.

Coldwell picked it up and examined it curiously. It was a large,
square emerald in a platinum setting, one edge of which was broken, as
though it had been torn forcibly from a large ornament.

“That is queer,” he said.

She took the emerald from his hand and carried it nearer to the lamp.
Now she knew that she had made no mistake. It was the pendant on the
chain she had seen that evening glittering on Lady Raytham’s neck!




 CHAPTER VI.
 THE EFFECT ON LADY RAYTHAM

In a few words she told her companion. For his part he was too
worried about her presence to comprehend fully.

“You had better get into the car, Leslie. Driver, take Miss
Maughan----”

“I’ll stay here,” said Leslie in a low voice. “I’m not very shocked.
And please don’t touch that overcoat.”

He was stooping to unfasten the button when she spoke.

“Not till you let me see it.”

Mr. Coldwell hesitated a moment and then stepped aside, and the girl
bent over the figure, keeping her eyes averted from that white face.

“I thought so,” she said. “The second button has been fastened to the
third buttonhole. Whoever killed him, put on his overcoat and buttoned
it. Now you can unfasten it.”

Mr. Coldwell sent the chauffeur for assistance and resumed his
examination of the body. The man had been shot at close range through
the heart; the waistcoat had been burned by the explosion. There were
no other injuries that he could see. One side of the figure was yellow
with dust, as though it had been dragged some distance along the
ground.

“I wish you wouldn’t----”

Coldwell looked round in helpless distress. He had taken an electric
flash light from the car before he sent it away, and this he had
placed on the path so that the rays spread fan-shape over the body.

“Couldn’t you wait at a little distance?”

“Please don’t worry about me, Mr. Coldwell,” said Leslie. There was no
tremor in her voice, he noted with satisfaction. “I am not going to
faint. You seem to forget that the majority of nurses are women; and
death isn’t so horrible to me as some expressions of life. Can I help
you at all? I’ve got a tiny little pencil lamp in my bag.”

He scratched his chin.

“I don’t know,” he said dubiously. “You might look in the road and see
if you can find any marks of a body being dragged, and then search
around a bit.”

She got out the lamp, which, in spite of its smallness, gave a very
bright light, and carried out his instructions methodically. She had
not to look far before she found the traces she sought: a serpentine
smear that reached from the centre of the road to the sidewalk. There
were stains--little red smudges that were still wet when she put her
finger to them.

The conditions were favourable to an undisturbed search, for Barnes
Common was unusually free from traffic. One motor bus lumbered past, a
homeward-bound limousine from town was succeeded by another, and if
the chauffeurs were interested in the spectacle of a man kneeling by
what looked like a heap of rags on the sidewalk, the occupants of the
cars did not apparently share their curiosity.

She paced the trail, judged it to be between twelve and thirteen feet
from the place where the body was found. On the other side of the
footpath was rough, common land: grass and bushes in irregular
patches. She began to search the ground; and here she had an unusual
reward, for, passing round a thick, low bush, she saw, lying together
on the grass, a number of objects. The first was a flat pocketbook
that had been opened and its contents pulled out, for round about was
a litter of papers, which she collected quickly. Fortunately, it was a
still night, and there was no wind to carry them away. The second
package was a brown envelope, and she made a brief examination.

There was a steamship ticket issued to “Anthony Druze, First Class
Saloon, Southampton to New York.” In this envelope was a new passport.
The third object was also a pocketbook--brand-new--the perfume of the
Russian-leather cover told her that. This also had been opened in such
a hurry that the strap about it had been broken. It was stuffed tight
with thousand-dollar notes.

She collected the three packages and sought for more, but there was
none. And then she took stock of the place where she had found them.
It was immediately behind a big bush which effectively screened all
view of the road. She put her lamp close to the ground and moved it
slowly. Here was a curiously mottled patch of grass; in some places it
was gray with frost, in others wet and crushed. The ground was too
hard for footprints, but without their aid she could reconstruct all
that had happened here less than an hour ago. Somebody had come behind
this brush to examine the contents of the pockets; the papers had been
taken out one by one, examined and thrown away, and the object had not
been robbery. The tightly filled pocketbook proved that. It could not
have been a chance thief who came upon the body; no honest person
would have made this search. It had been somebody looking for a
definite thing.

She went back to Coldwell with her discoveries just as the police car
came flying over the railway bridge, followed by a motor ambulance.
She told Coldwell hurriedly what she had found, and he was not
surprised.

“I’ve been searching his pockets; most of them are inside out,” he
said. And then, abruptly: “Where is Peter Dawlish?”

She stared at him open-mouthed.

“Peter Dawlish? What has he got to do----”

And then she remembered Peter’s threat, and saw that it was inevitable
that suspicion should attach to him.

“He hadn’t a pistol yesterday,” she said, “and I doubt whether he’s
got one now. If Druze had been shot dead in the street I should think
he’d be under suspicion, but Peter Dawlish would hardly shoot a man,
put him in a car, and drive him to Barnes.”

The old man nodded.

“I agree with you, Leslie, but we shall have to pull him in and make
inquiries. Druze has been shot three times; that’s rather a queer
thing, and he has been shot through the heart! We shan’t know exactly
until the pathologist has seen him, but I think I am right. And
listen, did you see the footprints?”

He pointed to the smooth granite curb, and she saw for the first time
the indubitable impressions of a bare foot; the ball of the foot and
toe prints were unmistakable.

He put the three packages Leslie had found in his overcoat pocket.

“Go along and see Lady Raytham and tell her what has happened. Take
this with you, and for the love of Mike don’t lose it!”

He put the square emerald in her hand, and she dropped it into her
bag.

“If it’s the pendant, as you say, find out what has happened to the
rest of the necklace.”

He bundled her into the police car, and she was glad to escape,
because by now the large force of police on the spot had been
augmented by that curious crowd which sooner or later gathers from
nowhere on the scene of any tragedy.

The windows were in darkness when she drove up to the house in
Berkeley Square, and instead of ringing she wielded the heavy knocker.
She had to wait a little time, and then it was a footman who opened
the door, and his manner and mien were both respectful and a little
nervous.

“Do you want to see her ladyship, miss?” he said. “She’s upstairs with
Mrs. Gurden; there is Mrs. Gurden now.”

Greta was coming down the stairs. She was in that peculiar style of
evening dress which she affected. Greta made most of her own clothes
from the latest Paris models and usually in the most unsuitable
material. Their “home-madeness” was never blatant. They did not
proclaim but hinted it.

Leslie looked up at the rouged face and the black, staring eyes, and
it required no particular acumen on her part to detect Greta Gurden’s
agitation.

“Oh, my dear Miss whatever-your-name is,” she said, “do come up and
see Lady Raytham! You are Miss what-is-your-name? Maughan, isn’t it?
I’m so glad! Druze has been a perfect beast.” She held out her hand
dramatically; it was shaking. “You don’t know how glad I am to see
you.”

Her eyelids were blinking up and down with a rapidity that fascinated
and would have amused Leslie in any other circumstances.

“What has Druze been doing?” she asked.

“Won’t you come up and see Lady Raytham?” begged Greta. “She’ll tell
you so much better than I. My dear Jane can put everything into the
most understandable terms. Druze has been simply awful: made a
terrible scene and walked out quite suddenly. It’s dreadful what
servants are coming to, isn’t it? I think it must be the war or----”

A cool voice from the darkness above interrupted her flow of
disjointed explanation.

“Ask Miss Maughan to come up. I want to see her--alone.”

Leslie went up the stairs, and as she reached the first turn, she saw
that the drawing-room door was open. There was no light on the stairs,
save for that which came from the open door. In one corner of the
spacious landing she saw a small-wheeled table.

She walked in, closing the door behind her. Lady Raytham was standing
behind a little table near the fireplace. She wore a dark day dress
without ornamentation, and Leslie’s quick woman’s eyes saw that she
had changed her stockings; the very fine-textured, flesh-coloured
hosiery she had seen on her earlier that evening had been replaced by
a slightly darker pair. But only for a second did the details of the
dress interest her. What a change had come to Jane Raytham’s face! She
was made up, that was clear. The delicate flush of her cheeks was
neither natural nor normal in her; she had helped her lips toward a
verisimilitude to a healthy red. Her eyes, however, defied all
artificial aid; they seemed to have sunk into her head; great dark
circles, which even careful powdering could not disguise, surrounded
them.

“Have you brought me any news?” she drawled out. It was not like Lady
Raytham to drawl. “I telephoned to you about an hour ago, but
unfortunately I could not catch you. On the whole, I think I prefer
that a woman officer should deal with this case.”

“Has he stolen anything?” asked Leslie bluntly, and to her amazement
Lady Raytham shook her head.

“No, I’ve missed nothing; I shouldn’t imagine he would steal. He may
have, of course, but I shall be able to tell you more about that
to-morrow. He was grossly insulting and left me at a second’s notice.”

“Have you been out?”

“Yes, I went to a dinner with Princess Anita Bellini; we intended
going on to the theatre, but I had a headache and decided to return.”

“What time did you come back?” asked Leslie.

Lady Raytham raised her eyes to the ceiling.

“It may have been half-past nine--probably a little earlier,” she
said. “We dined at a little restaurant which the princess knows----”

“And then you came back and had another dinner!” said Leslie steadily.
“The table is still on the landing--set for two, so far as I could
see.”

For a second the woman was staggered out of self-control. Her hand
went up to her lips.

“Oh, that?” she said awkwardly. “My friend Mrs. Gurden came later,
and--and we gave her some supper.”

Leslie shook her head.

“I wish you would be frank with me, Lady Raytham,” she said. “The
truth is, you didn’t go out to dinner at all, did you?”

For a second the woman made no reply.

“I don’t know what I did,” she said.

Between despair and suppressed anger her voice was a wail.

“He drove everything out of my mind. Oh, if I had known! If I had
known!”

She covered her eyes with her hands, and Leslie heard the sobs she
could not stifle.

“What did he say to you before he went?” she asked inexorably.

Lady Raytham shook her head.

“I can’t tell you. He was dreadful, dreadful!”

Leslie had waited this opportunity to fire her shot.

“He is in our hands,” she said. “Shall we bring him here?”

The woman uncovered her eyes and stepped back with a little scream.

“Here? Here?” she said huskily. “My heavens, not here! He must go to
the mort----”

She stopped herself, but too late.

“How did you know he was dead?” asked Leslie sternly.

Under the rouge the woman’s face was gray.




 CHAPTER VII.
 LESLIE’S INTERVIEW

“How did you know he was dead?” asked Leslie again. “Who told you?”

“I--I heard.” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.

“Who told you? Nobody knows but the inspector and me, and I have come
straight away from the place where he was found. I left him three
minutes ago.”

“Three minutes? I don’t understand.” And then, as she saw that she had
been trapped for the second time, the colour came and went in Jane
Raytham’s face.

“I don’t wonder that you are surprised, Lady Raytham! You know that
Barnes Common is a little more than three minutes away, don’t you?”

The woman looked round like some hunted animal seeking an avenue of
escape.

“I know he is dead,” she said desperately.

And then she faced the girl with a new resolution and a courage which
Leslie could only admire.

“I know he’s dead!” she exclaimed. “I know he’s dead! Heaven knows who
killed him, but I found him there. I saw him as my car was passing--on
the sidewalk. I somehow knew it was he and got out. That is how I
know. I should have told the police, I suppose, but I was frightened,
terribly frightened. I thought I should faint.”

“Where were you going when you found his body?”

Leslie’s grave eyes were fixed on the woman.

“To--to the Princess Bellini. She has a house in Wimbledon.”

“But you couldn’t have parted with her for very long, when you decided
to follow her.”

Jane Raytham licked her dry lips.

“She left something behind--the night was rather pleasant--I wanted
the air, so I drove----”

“Won’t you sit down, Lady Raytham?” said the girl gently.

The woman looked ready to drop. With a little nod she sank down into
an easy-chair that was near at hand.

Humanity was at the back of Leslie Maughan’s suggestion, but there was
something else. She had learned at Scotland Yard never to interrogate
either a prisoner or a possible witness while you are on the same
level with them. It was a piece of information that had been conveyed
to her by the greatest of the criminal counsel of the Bar. “Put a
witness on a lower level,” he said, “and he’ll tell you the truth.”

Now she looked down at the broken woman who was nervously fingering
the arm of the chair, and a wave of pity swept over Leslie Maughan,
such as she had never experienced before.

“You were not going to Princess Bellini’s, Lady Raytham,” she said
gently. “You were looking for Druze; he had taken something of yours.”

Lady Raytham gazed at her without answering.

“You thought he had gone to the Princess Bellini’s. Is that the way,
across Barnes Common?”

“It is--a way--yes.”

“Then you saw the body and recognized it? Saw it in the light of your
headlamps, as we did? You weren’t on your way to Wimbledon at all; you
were coming back. I saw the rear lights of your car!”

Lady Raytham was breathing quickly.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“You wouldn’t have seen the body otherwise. It lay on the left-hand
footpath as you came toward London, on the farther path as you came
from London. What kind of a car have you?”

Jane told her.

“So you had been to Princess Bellini? And what did Princess Bellini
tell you?”

“She was not at home.”

Instinctively Leslie Maughan recognized that Jane Raytham was speaking
the truth now.

“So you came back, and you found the body? Searched it?”

The woman nodded.

“What were you seeking?”

Again the quick movement of tongue across parched lips.

“I can’t tell you.”

Suddenly Leslie looked round. Noiselessly crossing the floor, she
turned the handle quickly and jerked open the door. Mrs. Gurden nearly
fell into the room.

“Are you fearfully interested?” asked Leslie. Her tone was almost
sweet.

The discomfited eavesdropper grimaced and tittered hysterically.

“I was just coming in--really, it was very awkward. My shoe lace came
unfastened and I was just stooping. I don’t know whatever you think of
me, but you really must believe me, Miss Maughan, you really must! I
think prying and spying people are simply dreadful, don’t you, dear?”

“I do, dear!” said Leslie dryly, and pointed to the stairs. “Would you
mind sitting on the bottom step until I come down?”

Greta went tittering down the stairs.

“Was she listening? Was she?” Lady Raytham asked the question with
unusual energy.

“No, I don’t think she had been there long. I have an uncanny
knowledge when I am being overheard. I had it just at that moment.
Lady Raytham, where is your emerald necklace?”

If she had struck the woman she could not have produced a more
startling effect. Jane Raytham sprang to her feet with a low cry and
put out a hand as though she were warding off some terrible menace.
For a second her beautiful face was distorted with fear.

“Oh!” she gasped out. “Why do you say that?”

“Where is your necklace? Can I see it?”

Jane Raytham thought for a moment, her chin on her breast, and then
slowly raised her eyes.

“Yes. Will you come with me?” she said in a whisper. Leslie followed
her out of the room into the bedroom on the right that opened from the
landing.

She switched on the lights, and they crossed to a corner of the room
where on the wall hung, apparently, a small Rembrandt in a gilt frame.
The picture must have been a very good copy, but it was no more. When
Jane Raytham touched the frame it swung open like a door and showed
behind a small, square safe set in the wall. Lady Raytham turned the
key with a hand that shook--not even her iron nerve could conceal her
emotion. Taking out a jewel box, she carried it to a table, pressed a
hidden spring, and the lid flew open. And there the dumfounded Leslie
saw the emerald chain--intact! Intact even to the square emerald
pendant!

Leslie picked up the jewel and surveyed it in bewilderment. Then,
opening her bag, she brought to light the emerald that had been found
in the dead hand of Druze and placed it by the side of the pendant of
the chain.

They were exactly alike.

“Are there two chains?” she asked.

“No,” said Jane Raytham.

“Is that the one you wore to-night?”

She nodded.

Her eyes were flaming. Even under that terrible strain, she could not
restrain her natural curiosity.

“Where did you get that?” she asked.

“We found it in Druze’s hand,” replied Leslie.

The woman’s mouth opened in astonishment.

“You found--nothing else? No other----” Again she stopped quickly.

“No other part of the chain--no. Wasn’t it this you were looking for?”

Leslie saw her expression change. Was it relief she detected?
Certainly her tone was lighter and less strained when she spoke.

“No, I wasn’t looking for that. Who killed him?”

“Who do you think?”

Eye to eye they stood, silent for the space of a second.

“Why should I suspect anybody?”

Leslie Maughan fired her second shot.

“Shall I suggest a name?” she asked. “Peter Dawlish!”

Again that quick upward jerk of the chin, as though she were meeting
some sickening pain.

“Peter Dawlish?” she said loudly. “Peter Dawlish! You’re mad--mad to
think Peter Dawlish----”

Without warning, she stumbled forward and Leslie had only time to
throw out her arms and take the weight of her as she fell in a swoon
to the ground.

In a second Leslie had pressed the bell and had thrown open the door.
The footman came running up.

“Open one of those windows, and get me some brandy.”

He gaped down at the white-faced woman on the floor.

“Is her ladyship ill?” he asked.

“Don’t ask questions! Open the window! Hurry.”

And as the French windows were thrown violently open, she said:

“Now get the brandy.”

Before the man had come back, Jane Raytham had opened her eyes and
stared inquiringly up into the face that was bent to hers.

“What happened? I fainted. I’m a fool! Let us go out.”

With Leslie’s assistance she rose unsteadily to her feet.

“I’d better put your jewel case back in the safe, hadn’t I? Or perhaps
you’d rather do it?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the woman listlessly.

And in that moment Leslie Maughan guessed why Anthony Druze had died.

Slipping her arm round Jane Raytham’s waist, she took her back to the
drawing room, insisted upon her lying on the couch, propping a pillow
under her head, and throwing a heavy silken scarf that drooped on a
chair back over her feet.

“You’re very good,” murmured Lady Raytham, “and I loathe you so much!”

“I suppose you do,” said Leslie, “And yet you shouldn’t, because I
haven’t been at all unpleasant.”

Jane nodded her head in agreement.

“Will you keep very quiet when I tell you this? I haven’t suggested
that you will be under suspicion of shooting Druze.”

She had no need to be a reader of faces to realize that this
possibility had never occurred to Jane Raytham.

“I?” she said incredulously. “But how absurd! Why should I shoot? Oh,
but that is impossible! It is impossible that anybody should think
such a thing!” And, in spite of Leslie’s warning, she struggled erect.
“You don’t think so, do you?”

She was on her feet, peering into the girl’s face, her hand gripping
Leslie’s wrist fiercely.

“You don’t think so? I hated Druze! I hated him, hated him!” She
stamped her foot in her fury. “You don’t know what it has meant to
me--every morning to see his face, every minute liable to his
presence. Do you realize what that meant? I had to school myself so
that I didn’t shudder at the sight of him, and the mock humility of
his ‘yes, my lady’ and ‘no, my lady’ that I might sit unmoved at my
own table and face my own husband, and appear oblivious to the
horrible masquerade----”

She stopped, exhausted by her own vehemence.

Leslie waited a moment and then:

“What is Anthony Druze to you?”

Lady Raytham stared at her.

“To me--you mean---- What do you mean?”

Suddenly she burst into a paroxysm of laughter. It was dreadful to see
her.

“Oh, you fool! You little fool! Can’t you guess? Don’t you know?”

And then suddenly she ran out of the room. Leslie heard her bedroom
door slam and the snap of the turning key and knew that her interview
was ended.




 CHAPTER VIII.
 A SURPRISE FOR LESLIE

It was two o’clock when a taxicab stopped in Severall Street,
Lambeth, and a very weary girl alighted. The detective whom she had
asked by telephone to meet her was waiting at the corner of the street
and ran toward her.

“You want Mrs. Inglethorne’s, don’t you, miss? The house is on the
opposite side of the road.”

He hurried across the street and knocked at a door. Twice and three
times he knocked before a sash went up and the voice of Peter Dawlish
asked:

“Who is it?”

He had hardly asked the question before he recognized the girl.

“I’ll be down in a second!”

But before he could descend, the landlady herself made an appearance.
She was a little tremulous of voice, more than a little whining, when
she recognized the familiar countenance of the detective.

“Whatcher want? There’s nobody here except my young man lodger and
he’s straight. A policeman recommended him.”

“This lady is from Scotland Yard and she wishes to see him, Mrs.
Inglethorne,” said the detective soothingly. “Don’t get worried.”

“Worried! Me workin’ my fingers to the bone and my old man in ‘stir’
though as innocent as a babe unborn----”

By this time Peter Dawlish had descended.

“Do you wish to see me?”

She nodded.

“Where can I see you? Can you come out and sit in the cab for a few
minutes?”

“Certainly.”

“There is another favour I want to ask you. Will you be very annoyed
if I ask you to allow this police officer to search your room?”

He was struck dumb for a second.

“Certainly! Why, is something lost?”

“Nothing.” She turned to the detective and gave him instructions in a
low tone; he pushed past the frightened landlady and went upstairs.

“Now come into the cab. You won’t catch cold?”

He laughed irritatedly.

“I’m so hot with righteous indignation that I would melt an iceberg!”
he said.

He stepped into the taxi and pulled the door tight.

“Now, Miss Maughan!”

She looked sideways at him; the white face of the lantern illuminating
the taximeter formed a reflector that gave some light to the interior
of the car.

“What have you been doing all evening?” she asked.

“From what hour?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“I’ve been in the house. A job came to me this morning addressing
envelopes and I’ve been working since seven till within a few minutes
of your arrival. About two thousand of them are already addressed; I
think that accounts for my time. I only had the envelopes and lists at
six-thirty. Why, what has happened?”

“Druze is dead.”

“Dead?”

“Murdered! His body was found on Barnes Common some time between
eleven forty-five and midnight.”

He whistled softly.

“That is a bad business. How was he killed?”

“Shot--at close range.”

He was silent for a time.

“Naturally, after my wild and woolly threats, you suspected me. Come
up and see the envelopes. My bedroom is the only decent room in the
house.”

She hesitated, then, stretching out her hand, pulled back the lock of
the door.

Mrs. Inglethorne was past surprising. She stood at the foot of the
stairs, an old ulster over her dressing gown, and watched the two go
up without comment.

“There is nothing here, miss,” said the detective before he caught
sight of Peter. “Nothing except these.” He indicated with a wave of
his hand a deal table covered with small envelopes neatly packed.

Leslie smiled.

“You needn’t have told me you’d been working here, Mr. Dawlish,” she
said. “It is like a smoke room!”

The aroma of cigarettes still hung about in spite of the open windows;
the tin she had sent to him was on the table, only half full.

“I’ve been a little extravagant,” he said apologetically, “but the
temptation was great.”

The detective still lingered by the door, evidently in two minds as to
whether it would be proper to leave them in this peculiar environment.
Leslie saved him the responsibility of a decision by:

“Thank you very much. I will be down in a minute or two,” she said.

She sat at the foot of the bed, her arm over the rail, and looked at
Peter. She would not have recognized him; he was clean-shaven, spruce.
There was a certain buoyancy in his attitude which was new to her.
Good-looking, too, and in spite of his approaching thirty years and
all that he had suffered, remarkably youthful. It added a piquant
interest to her scrutiny that she knew so much about his past--so much
more than he guessed.

A husky voice hailed them from the foot of the stairs.

“Would you like a cup of tea, miss?”

Peter Dawlish looked at the girl with a smile.

“She really makes rather good tea,” he said in a low voice.

“I should love one,” she nodded, and he called softly down the stairs
and came back.

“I’m scared of waking Elizabeth,” he said, and added: “You look
fagged!”

“Which means that I look hideous,” she retorted with a frank smile. “I
won’t bandy compliments with you, or I would congratulate you upon the
marked improvement which the barber has brought about. Did you know
Druze very well?”

“Not very well,” he said.

“Tell me something about him--all that you know.”

He frowned at this, evidently trying to remember matters that had
passed, facts that had gone out of his recollection.

“He came to Lord Everreed’s place soon after I took up my post,” he
said. “My aunt the Princess Bellini recommended him----”

“The princess recommended him?” she said quickly. “Why? Was he in her
service?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “He was with Aunt Anita in Java for years. Her
husband held some sort of minor post on one of the plantations: he
was, I believe, a fairly poor man. After his death she came to
England, and Druze came with her; in Java she had afforded the luxury
of a butler; living is rather cheap there, but when she came to
England she got rid of him. I have a distinct recollection of the
letter she wrote to Lord Everreed, which I answered. I call her
‘aunt,’” he explained, “although she was only the half sister of my
father, and in reality no relation to me at all. How long Druze
remained with Lord Everreed, of course I do not know. From the date of
my conviction that page of history is closed. But a few years after I
had gone to prison I heard in a roundabout fashion--I think it was in
a letter which an old servant of ours wrote--that he had gone into the
service of Lady Raytham.”

She thought over this for some time.

“When were you arrested?”

“Seven and a half years ago.”

She looked up in surprise.

“Then you served the full sentence?”

He nodded.

“Yes. I am not on ticket-of-leave. The truth is, I was rather a
troublesome prisoner. I suppose most prisoners are who have the
delusion of innocence. Why do you ask?”

“I have reason to believe that the princess thought you only served
five,” said the girl. “But that really doesn’t matter. I suppose she’s
of an age that---- I’m being cattish! Now, tell me something more.”

“You look a very sleepy cat,” he said, and at that moment there came
through the door a strange little figure.

How old she was it was difficult to tell, but Leslie guessed her to be
six, though she was tall for that age. She was painfully thin, and her
little arms, which carried with solemn attention a cup of tea, were
hardly more than of the thickness of the bones that showed through the
flesh. Her face, pinched and thin and translucent, had a beauty which
made the girl catch her breath. She raised two big eyes to survey the
visitor, and then the long lashes fell on her cheeks.

“Your tea,” she said.

Leslie took the cup gently from the child’s hand and set it down.

“What’s your name?” she asked, and as she put her hand on the yellow
head, the little creature shrank back, her face puckered with fear.

“That’s Belinda!” said Peter, with a smile.

The child wore a ragged old mackintosh over a nightgown that had once
been of red flannelette, but which had washed to the palest of pinks.
Her hands, lightly clasped before her, were almost transparent.

“I’m Mrs. Inglethorne’s little girl,” she said in a low voice. “My
name is ’Lizabeth--not Belinda.”

She raised her eyes quickly to the man and dropped them again. The
gravity of her tone, the low sweetness of her voice, amazed Leslie
Maughan. For a second she forgot that she was too tired to be
interested even in the bizarre.

“Won’t you come and talk to me?”

The child glanced at the door.

“Mother wants me.”

“Talk to the lady!”

Evidently Mrs. Inglethorne at the bottom of the stairs had good ears.
The child started, looked apprehensively round and came sidling toward
Leslie.

“What do you do with yourself?” asked Leslie. “Do you go to school?”

Elizabeth nodded.

“I think about Daddy most of the time.”

Leslie remembered that Daddy was at that moment serving his country in
Dartmoor.

“I keep him in a book; he’s very nice--ever so nice.” The child nodded
soberly.

“In a book?” asked Leslie. “What kind of a book?”

A voice outside the door supplied an answer. Mrs. Inglethorne must
have crept up the stairs to listen better.

“Don’t take no notice of her, miss; she’s a bit cracked! Any
good-looking feller she sees in a book she says is her father! Why,
she used to take the king once, and then Lord what’s-his name; and
when I think of her own poor dear father that worked his fingers to
the bone and got a ‘stretch’ for nothing, as innocent as a babe
unborn--it’s very hard----”

Elizabeth was tense now; her big eyes narrowed, her ear turned to the
door. It was an attitude of apprehension, and Leslie’s heart ached for
the child. She smoothed her hair, and this time the little girl did
not shrink.

“I’ll send you some wonderful pictures and you’ll be able to make up
fathers and uncles and all sorts of nice things from them.”

Stooping, she kissed the child, and with her arm about her painfully
thin shoulders led her to the door. On the landing the
unhealthy-looking Mrs. Inglethorne smirked and squirmed, a picture of
gratitude for the lady’s condescension.

“I’m going to be very interested in Elizabeth,” said Leslie, her
steady eyes on the woman. “You won’t mind if I come round sometimes to
see how she is getting on?”

Mrs. Inglethorne made a fearful grimace which was intended to express
her pleasure.

“How many children have you?”

“Five, miss.”

The woman was looking at her curiously, possibly fascinated by her
first meeting with the female of the hated species.

“Five in this little house?” Leslie raised her eyebrows. “Where do you
keep them all?”

Again the woman wriggled, this time uncomfortably.

“In the kitchen, miss, except the two girls; they sleep in my room.”

“I’d like to have a look at your kitchen.”

“It’s a bit late and you’d wake ’em up,” said Mrs. Inglethorne after
hesitation.

But Leslie waited, and reluctantly Mrs. Inglethorne went down the
stairs, the girl following. The kitchen was at the back of the house,
approached by a narrow passage. It was a room barely ten feet square,
cold and miserably furnished. In the unsatisfactory light of the oil
lamp the woman carried she saw not three but four little bundles; one,
a child which could not have been three years old, slept in a soap box
on the floor. Its coverlet was a strip of dusty carpet which had been
roughly cut to fit the shape of the box. Two children were huddled
together under the table, wrapped in an old army overcoat. The fourth
lay in a corner under a flour sack, so still that she might have been
dead: a girl of eleven, sandy-haired, sharp-featured, who shivered and
groaned in her sleep as the light of the lamp came upon her face.

“It’s very ’ard on a woman who’s got five mouths to fill,” complained
Mrs. Inglethorne, “but I wouldn’t part with ’em for the world! And
it’s warm in the kitchen when we’ve had a coke fire going all
evening.”

Leslie went out of that sad little room sick at heart. Poverty she had
seen and understood. Possibly these unfortunate children were as well
off as thousands of others in the great metropolis. The weaklings
would die; the fittest would survive and drag their stunted bodies to
a free school where they would be taught just enough to enable them to
write their betting slips and read the football reports intelligently.

Peter was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs.

“I think I’ll go home now. I’m rather tired,” she said. “Most likely
you will be interrogated to-morrow either by Mr. Coldwell or an
officer from the Yard. I think the best thing you can do is to go up
and interview him.”

And then, abruptly:

“Have you seen your mother since you have been free?”

He shook his head.

“My parent has expressed her wishes on the matter in unmistakable
terms. We were never _en rapport_, so to speak, and perhaps it is a
little too late now to attempt to arrive at a mutual understanding.”

She looked down at the floor, her lips pursed.

“I wonder,” she said, and held out her hand. “Good-night, Peter
Dawlish.”

He took the hand, held it for a second, and then:

“You’re rather wonderful. I’m getting a new angle on life,” he said.

She had one more call to make. Inspector Coldwell had promised to wait
at Scotland Yard until she returned with her report, and she found him
sipping coffee in the lobby, and told him briefly the result of her
visit.

“I never thought Peter knew much about it. What does he know of
Druze?”

He listened intently until she had finished.

“Rum! All the paths in this maze lead back to the Princess Bellini.
Yes, I’ll see Peter; I’ll wire him in the morning,” he said, yawning.
“It is time all honest people were in bed. I’m going to take you
home.”

Her cab was waiting, and though she had no need of an escort, he
pointed out that her way was largely his.

“What we’re going to do about Lady Raytham I don’t know. I’m taking it
for granted that you have discovered a whole lot that you haven’t told
me.”

“Not a whole lot, a little,” she admitted.

Mr. Coldwell scratched his head.

“That little is usually crucial. However, I am not going to discourage
you. Keep your mystery; a little romance in police work has a
wonderful tonic value.”

The cab carried them across deserted Trafalgar Square, and a few
seconds later stopped before the door of Leslie’s flat.

“I suppose you know all that is to be known about the case?” he said,
with a touch of the sardonic, as he handed her out of the cab. “Whilst
I, a poor old muddle-headed copper, am groping round like a
blindfolded man in a fog!”

“I think I know a lot,” she admitted, with a tired smile.

Coldwell was amused.

“The complacency of the woman! Here she is, keeping all her clues up
her sleeve, ready to spring them out and reduce police headquarters to
a bewildered pulp! Know all about Druze, do you?”

“I know a lot about him.”

“Fine!” said Coldwell.

She had the door open now, and he waited until she was in the passage
before he dropped his bombshell.

“Promise me you won’t come out and ask questions, but will go straight
up to bed, if I tell you something?”

“I promise,” she said.

He put his hand on the knob of the door, ready to shut it.

“Arthur or Anthony Druze, as he was variously called, was a woman!”

The door slammed on her; before she recovered from her stupor she
heard the rattle of the cab as it moved away.




 CHAPTER IX.
 DRUZE’S HANDICAP

Druze--a woman! It was incredible--almost impossible! Yet that
shrewd old man would not have jested with her. She dragged herself up
the stairs, her limp body aching for rest, her mind very wide awake
and alert.

Druze a woman! She shook her head helplessly. And then she remembered
Lady Raytham’s hysterical laughter. “What was Druze to you?” Jane
Raytham knew!

Leslie was too sane, too big, to feel foolish. She stopped on the
landing and leaning heavily on the balustrade, she recalled the
hairless face and figure of the portly butler. All her theories must
go by the board. A scaffolding must be erected on a new foundation.

She found Lucretia Brown huddled up in a chair before a dead fire,
fast asleep. Lucretia had never been trained out of her habit of
“waiting up.” It was her firm conviction that only this practice of
hers saved her mistress from a terrible fate. She woke with a start
and came reeling to her feet.

“Oh, miss!” she gasped out. “What time is it?”

Leslie glanced at the mantelpiece.

“Three o’clock,” she said, “and a fine morning! Why aren’t you in bed,
you poor, knock-kneed girl?”

“I’m not knock-kneed and never was,” protested Lucretia. “Three
o’clock, miss? What a time!” She shivered. And then, morbidly curious:
“Has anything been up, miss?”

“More things are ‘up’ than will ever come down, I think,” replied
Leslie, as she dropped into a chair. “There’s been a murder.”

“Good heavens!” said the shocked Lucretia. And then, with pardonable
curiosity: “Who done it?”

“If I knew ‘who done it,’ I’d be a very contented female.”

Leslie stifled a yawn.

“Run the bath, Lucretia, make me some hot milk, and don’t wake me till
ten o’clock.”

“If I’m awake then,” said Lucretia ominously. “I never see such a
place as this. You turn night into day. Did he have his throat cut?”
She returned to the tragedy.

“No. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it was quite ghastly enough.”

She dragged herself to her feet and went to her desk, turning over the
letters that had arrived by the night mail. There was one which looked
promising. She tore off the end of the envelope, read its contents,
and locked the document away in a drawer. A little while later, before
Lucretia had run the water from the bath, Leslie Maughan, snug between
sheets, was sleeping dreamlessly.

She woke with a dim remembrance of the rattle of teacups and of
Lucretia’s calling her. Partly opening her eyes, she saw the cup by
her bedside. She was horribly tired; bed was a warm and luxurious
place; she must have dozed for the sound of voices wakened her.

Her bedroom led from her sitting room and the door was half open. Two
people were speaking--Lucretia and somebody else whose voice was
familiar.

“I will wait. Please don’t wake Miss Maughan especially for me.”

Leslie sat up in bed. Through the closing door which the maid was
jealously guarding, she saw the big, straight figure of a woman. Lady
Raytham! In an instant she was out of bed, thrust her feet into
slippers, and pulled her dressing gown about her. She stopped only at
the mirror to brush back her hair.

Lady Raytham was standing in the middle of the study, a bright coal
fire was burning, and the room, at that early hour of the morning, had
a special attraction for its young owner. But Jane Raytham’s presence
seemed, for some unaccountable reason, to lend it a new distinction,
as a great bunch of Easter lilies, or a bowl of narcissus, might have
done.

“Good-morning. I’m sorry to be so early. I hope I did not disturb
you?”

She was polite, almost frigidly so, and Leslie could only look at her
in wonder. All the evidence of distress and terror that had marked her
face on the night before had vanished--all except that dark tint under
the eyes.

“Won’t you sit down? Have you had breakfast?” asked Leslie
practically.

Lady Raytham shook her head.

“Please don’t bother about me. I have plenty of time and can wait,”
she said.

There was a certain resentful admiration in her gaze; she was thinking
how few women of her acquaintance were presentable at such an hour and
in such circumstances. She had never seen Leslie Maughan in the
daytime before, and not only did she stand the test of the cruel
morning light, but she looked even prettier. She liked the poise of
the girl and the readiness with which she accepted this sensible
suggestion and disappeared into the bathroom, the gawky maid, her arms
laden with garments, following. By the time she came out, Lucretia
Brown had laid a little table; huge blue coffee cups and china racks
bristling with crisp brown toast.

“No, I couldn’t eat, thank you.” Lady Raytham shook her head. “I will
have some coffee.”

Leslie looked significantly at the door and Lucretia regretfully
disappeared.

“Yes, I slept,” said Jane Raytham listlessly. “I don’t know how or
why, but I did. I suppose I just couldn’t sleep any more. There is
nothing about the murder in the newspapers.”

Leslie made a mental calculation.

“There wouldn’t be; it will be in the evening press. I know all about
Druze.”

“You know--about her?” Jane Raytham looked at her steadily.

“What was her name?” asked Leslie, but the other woman shook her head.

“I don’t know; she was always Druze to me.”

“Did your husband know----”

“That she was a woman?” She shook her head. “No. Poor Raytham! He’d
have had a fit! But then, he never notices anything.”

She had married the first Baron Raytham when he was a little over
fifty, bachelor-minded, a man of set habits, who had found himself
most unexpectedly a benedict and was a little aghast at the discovery.
For the greater part of a year he had striven to be the model husband,
and had been something of a bore. The domestic habit was foreign to
him. Society and all its dainty et ceteras he loathed. Before the end
of the first year of their married life, he had given up all attempt
to interest himself in the new complexities which marriage had
brought. Thereafter he devoted his energies and thoughts to his
concession--his boards of directors, balance sheets, and all the
precious things which were life for him--and Jane Raytham was left
very much to her own devices.

“My husband is very seldom in London--probably not two months a year.
He has”--she hesitated--“other interests.”

Very wisely, Leslie did not pursue the subject. She too had heard that
Lord Raytham had carried into married life a loose string or two that
was substantially attached and which he was unwilling or unable to
drop. Leslie was too versed in the ways of the world to be shocked at
this; too sophisticated to be anything but mildly amused at the
inefficiency of man, who finds it so easy to get rid of a wife and so
difficult to discharge a feminine attachment.

“Your name is Leslie, isn’t it?” And, when she nodded: “I wonder if
you would mind my ‘Leslie-ing’ you? You’re not so formidable as I
thought. I--I rather like you. My name is Jane--if you ever feel
friendly enough to ‘Jane’ me--I’ve been abominably rude to you, but
now I’ve come to ask you for favours.”

Leslie laughed.

“I owe you an apology,” she said, and the other woman was quick to see
her meaning.

“About Druze? It would be a beastly idea, only--women are such queer
fools, aren’t they? No, I knew Druze was a woman; that made everything
so hideous. I wonder if you will believe me when I say that that was
almost my heaviest cross--almost.”

“What was really the heaviest?” asked Leslie quietly.

Lady Raytham fetched a long sigh and looked out of the window.

“I don’t know. It is rather difficult to compare these things.” And
then, quickly: “Of course, I know now which is the heaviest, but that
is so new and so crushing that I dare not let myself think about it.
Something Druze said to me before she went out; something she told me
that froze my blood.” She closed her eyes and shuddered, but recovered
instantly. “That is why I got my car and went in search of her. She
told me a little but not everything, and I had to know! My first
thought was--you’ll think I’m a hypocrite--that Peter had killed her.
If I thought at all! I don’t think I cared. I had only one idea in my
mind, to find something she had boasted about.”

“Not the necklace?”

Jane Raytham smiled contemptuously.

“The necklace! As if I cared for that! I’m making a clean breast of
everything--up to a point. The necklace you saw at the house last
night was only----”

“Was a copy, I know that,” said Leslie quietly. “An exact replica of
the real emerald chain, and, valueless! When you didn’t bother to put
it back in the safe, I guessed.”

Eye met eye, each striving to read the other’s thoughts.

“What else did you guess?” asked Jane Raytham, after a long silence,
and then:

“No, no, don’t tell me. I want to feel that nobody knows that--nobody!
You will tell me that I am trying to create a fool’s paradise myself,
and I’m a moral coward. I wonder if I am.” And then, obliquely: “Have
you seen Peter?”

“I saw him last night, yes. He knew nothing about the murder--not so
much as you,” said Leslie.

The woman ignored this challenge.

“I wonder how much you do know, Leslie?”

It was a strain to ask the question. Even as she had her reservations,
so also had Leslie Maughan. The truth must come from Jane Raytham or
not be truth at all.

“I know you were being blackmailed; that the necklace you gave was
part of the price; the twenty thousand pounds, which I imagine was all
you could raise in cash, was the other part. I guess also that Druze
was a blackmailer. Am I right?”

Jane nodded. There was a perceptible brightening of her face as
though, fearing to hear worse, she was experiencing relief at the
limitation of the girl’s knowledge.

“How long have you been paying?”

She did not answer, and Leslie repeated the question.

“I don’t know. Quite a long time.”

Another silence. The truth was not to come yet, then, only a measure
of it.

“Do you want to tell me any more?” she asked.

Jane Raytham drooped her head. She wanted to tell--just as much as
this frank and friendly girl knew, hoping against hope that the more
precious secret would remain with her, and yet almost praying that
Leslie Maughan would suddenly drag forth the grisly skeleton and
expose it to her eyes.

“Yes, I want to, terribly! But I shan’t. I can’t bring myself to put
things into words. And I want your help. How badly I need it! But, my
dear, you’re police, part of the machinery of Scotland Yard. I’ve told
you too much already. I shall be living in a flutter of fear all
day----”

“I’m Leslie Maughan in this flat,” said Leslie, smiling. “Just a sort
of little sister of the human race! But I’ll warn you that I am
determined, as far as I can, to find the murderer of that wretched
woman. Short of that information you can tell me anything.”

Jane shook her head ruefully.

“I don’t know who killed Druze. I will not swear that, but I will tell
you on my word I don’t know; I do not even suspect. Anita wanted to
know. I called on her this morning. She is like a woman distraught. I
never knew she felt so deeply. The police have been there to inquire
whether Druze called. I suppose you told them last night that I had
told you. Poor Anita! She was terribly fond of Druze, who was once in
her service. She always contended that he hadn’t been, and talked
about him as though he were the merest stranger. But that, I think,
was her pride; she hated the thought that she had ever been so
poverty-stricken that she was obliged to let him go--her, I mean. The
habit of years takes a lot of breaking! I have thought of Druze as a
man and spoken of him as a man so long, that it is difficult to get
out of the trick.”

“One question I want to ask you, Lady--Jane, I’d better call you. It
will be almost as difficult a habit to get into! Did Druze forge Lord
Everreed’s name as Peter Dawlish thinks he did?”

Jane Raytham shook her head.

“That is impossible,” she said simply.

“Why impossible?”

The answer took Leslie Maughan’s breath away.

“Because she could not read or write!”




 CHAPTER X.
 A DOCTOR’S CONFESSION

“Druze was illiterate, but, like all illiterate people, had acquired
a certain form of culture and was very clever to conceal this
misfortune. I think, in fact I know, she had the schooling of an
average child, but she was just incapable of learning. The Council
schools and even the public schools are full of people like that, of
girls and boys familiar with the most obscure sciences who have never
mastered these elementary arts.”

Leslie thought quickly.

“Her signature was on the passport?”

“I wrote it,” said the surprising woman. “She told me she wanted to go
across to France for a week-end trip and asked me if I would sign the
passport form. That was only a few weeks ago, so it is fresh in my
mind. Now tell me what I am to do? The police will come to me, and I
am prepared to tell them the truth, though I cannot see how I can help
them.”

“The whole truth?” asked Leslie significantly.

Jane Raytham looked at the girl for a long time before she answered.

“As much as I’ve told you--not as much as you guess,” she said, in her
even voice.

Leslie carried her cup of coffee to the desk.

“Would you like me to write down the gist of what you have said, and
sign the statement?” she asked. “That might save you an awful lot of
trouble.”

Jane hesitated.

“Is it necessary? I suppose it is,” she said. “Yes, if you would be so
kind.”

For ten minutes she watched the girl as her pen flew over the paper,
and took the pages from her as they were written.

“You have put my case more cleverly than I could have put it myself,”
she said with a little smile. “I almost think you’re sympathetic.”

“You don’t know how sympathetic I am,” said Leslie, rising from her
chair to make way for the other.

Lady Raytham sat down, read the last sheet again, and had dipped her
pen in the ink, when the sound of voices came from outside the door.
It was Lucretia’s raised protest, and a deeper voice, which Leslie
instantly recognized, and, running to the door, threw it open. The
Princess Anita Bellini stood on the landing, glaring through her
monocle at the defiant Lucretia.

“You can’t come in--Miss Maughan’s engaged,” she was saying. “I don’t
care if you’re a princess or if you’re the Queen of Sheba. When Miss
Maughan’s engaged, nobody can----!”

“That will do, Lucretia. Come in, Princess.”

The big woman strode into the apartment without a word of thanks, not
even deigning to look at the defiant maid.

“Where is----” she began, and then she saw Lady Raytham at the desk.
“What are you writing, Jane?” she demanded loudly. “You’re not being
such a fool as to make a statement to the police, are you?”

“Lady Raytham is merely telling me as much as I already know,” said
Leslie.

“Jane, you must not sign it. I forbid it!”

There was a tremor of anger in the hard voice, and, looking at the
woman, Leslie saw how deeply the tragedy must have affected her. She
seemed ten years older. The big slit of a mouth was turned down at the
ends, the eyes red and inflamed.

Very calmly Lady Raytham affixed her signature.

“Don’t be foolish, Anita,” she said quietly. “The police are entitled
to know certain things about Druze.”

“What have you told them? Can I see this precious document?”

She reached out her hand, but Leslie was before her.

“Let me read it to you, Princess,” she said, and placed the desk
between herself and her furious visitor. That Princess Bellini was in
a cold tremble of rage was patent.

She read without interruption to the end.

“Jane Raytham, you’re a fool to sign a thing like that!” stormed the
woman. “Let them find things out without committing yourself to paper.
This girl has tricked you into a confession----”

“Confession?” said Leslie, with a smile. “How absurd! Lady Raytham
knew that Druze was a woman; it was impossible that she should not.
And, as she says, she has only told us what we already knew, and what
you already knew.”

“I knew nothing,” said Anita Bellini harshly, her baleful eyes fixed
on the girl, “except that you have tricked Lady Raytham into making a
statement which will involve her in considerable trouble.”

Leslie faced her squarely, and for the first time Anita Bellini became
dimly and uncomfortably conscious of the strength of this
inconsiderable person. They had met before, and the honours of that
meeting had not rested with the princess. But she had thought of
Leslie as a girl with a certain glibness of tongue, a gift of smart
repartee, but without any of the especial qualities that she might
expect in a foe worthy of her heaviest metal. But now it had dawned
upon her that, whether she was “Coldwell’s pretty typist,” as she had
contemptuously referred to her, or whether she was “a Scotland Yard
underling,” she was certainly a factor to be considered and
forestalled. And if she had had any doubt on the subject, Leslie
Maughan’s first words would have dispelled it.

“Lady Raytham has made a statement, and you also will make a
statement, Princess,” she said, “either before or after the inquest.”

The woman surveyed her with an oddly sly look that was unnatural in
her.

“I don’t know how you can bring me in,” she began, and her tone was
milder than it had been.

“You employed Druze. Apparently you knew she was a woman, and are
acquainted with her early history,” said Leslie quietly. “That is
quite sufficient to bring you into any inquiry which the police set
afoot.”

Anita Bellini took out her monocle, polished it on her handkerchief
and returned it to her eye.

“Possibly I was rather precipitate,” she said. “But I think you should
make allowance for my--whatever I have said. I have been awfully upset
by Druze’s death. Would you read the statement again?”

It was a very simple record of the information which Lady Raytham had
given to the girl, and, when she had finished reading:

“No, there is nothing in that,” said the princess. “I suppose this
evidence has to come out. Does it mean that we shall be called at the
inquest? I couldn’t stand that, I couldn’t!”

In that instant Leslie detected a tremor in the woman’s voice. Anita
Bellini, the formidable, had a weak spot, after all. But she recovered
herself very quickly.

“If everybody had his due, Peter Dawlish would be under arrest,” she
said, and, ignoring the protests of Jane: “The man hated Druze; you
know that quite well, Jane. He threatened her; I can prove it!”

And then, in a conciliatory tone:

“I hope we’re not going to be bad friends, Miss Maughan. If I can help
you I will. Is there any more you can tell me than appears in the
evening newspaper?”

“Nothing,” said Leslie shortly.

They left together soon after, but before they departed, Leslie found
an opportunity of speaking a few words to Jane Raytham.

“I don’t want you to tell anybody about the necklace,” she said in a
low voice, as she accompanied her down the stairs. “Especially about
the emerald that was found in Druze’s hand. You promise me? Or have
you already told?”

Jane Raytham shook her head.

“I wondered why you hadn’t put that in the statement,” she suggested.
“But you may trust me. I shall not speak about it, even to Anita.”

At that moment the voice of the princess hailed her from the foot of
the stairs and further conversation became impossible.


Leslie arrived at Scotland Yard just before twelve, and was mounting
the stone stairs as Peter Dawlish came down.

“A clean bill,” he said with a smile. “At any rate, that is the
impression Coldwell gives me. It seems that your detective man’s
search was a very thorough one; I suppose you know that he searched me
also? And, by the way, Belinda sends her love.”

“Belinda?” Leslie was momentarily bewildered. “Oh, you mean that
little child, Elizabeth. How wicked! I had almost forgotten her!”

“She hasn’t forgotten you,” said Peter, and with a cheery wave of his
hand went on.

She found Mr. Coldwell in his big, comfortable office, the stub of a
cigar between his teeth, his bristling brows gathered in thought.

“Just going to phone you,” he mumbled. “I’ve seen that man of yours,
and I’m satisfied that he had nothing to do with the crime.”

“‘That man of mine’ being Peter Dawlish?” she said calmly. “You give
me quite a proprietorial feeling!”

From her bag she took the statement that Lady Raytham had signed and
laid it on the table before him. He read it through carefully, folded
it up and slipped it into a drawer.

“Did you tell Anita Bellini about the emerald we found in Druze’s
hand?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “That’s the last thing in the world I should have told
her; I asked Lady Raytham not to tell either. Why?”

He smiled grimly.

“Thought you hadn’t,” he said. “Her Serenity called me on the phone
five minutes ago, and said she’d read in one of the newspapers that
something very valuable had been found on Druze’s person. I haven’t
seen all the newspapers, but those I’ve read make no mention of the
emerald, and I don’t see why they should, unless they are psychic. The
princess suggested, rather than said, that you had confirmed this
mythical newspaper report.”

Leslie shook her head in admiration.

“That woman is certainly a quick worker,” she said. “What did you tell
her?”

Mr. Coldwell relit his cigar with the exasperating deliberation of his
age.

“I told her that we _had_ found something valuable--a packet of money.
She seemed kind of disappointed.”

The telephone bell shrilled; he picked up the receiver, listened in
silence for a time, and then:

“All right, I’ll come down,” he said.

“The Lambeth police have got a quaint clue--a kind of ready-made one,
but it should be investigated, as it has to do with your Peter. Would
you like to come along?”

She looked at him steadily.

“If you refer to him as my Peter again, I shall be very offensive to
you, Mr. Coldwell,” she said, and Coldwell scratched his chin.

“Somehow he seems to belong to you; I don’t know why I get that
impression.”

Her eyes wandered to a corner of the room and for the first time she
saw the two big travelling trunks. They were new and bore the label of
the Cunard Steamship Company.

“Druze’s,” he said laconically. “We’ll go through those when we come
back.”

It was at the corner of Severall Street that the taxicab stopped. The
local subdivisional inspector was waiting, and with him a detective.

“Let me have a look at that paper,” said Coldwell immediately, and
Leslie, who had not heard the one-sided conversation on the telephone,
wondered what was coming next.

The inspector took a dirty slip of paper from his pocketbook and
placed it in Coldwell’s hand. He fixed his glasses and read, then
passed the slip to the girl. The message was written in pencil and in
an illiterate hand:


 Dawlish keeps his gun under a loose board in his bedroom just as you
 go inside the door.


“Where did this come from?” asked Coldwell.

“It was delivered at the station just before I telephoned to you. A
street lad brought it along. He said it had been handed to him by a
man, who gave him a few coppers for his trouble. I thought it best
that you should know.”

They walked down the street toward Mrs. Inglethorne’s house and the
door was opened immediately by that lady, who was surprisingly clean
and spruce. She seemed surprised, but was certainly not agitated by
the appearance of the police officers.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Dawlish has just come in. Shall I call him down?”

“No, thank you; we’ll go up.”

Coldwell mounted the stairs and knocked at the door of the front room,
and a voice bade him come in. Over the inspector’s shoulder, Leslie
saw that Peter was sitting at a deal table, pen in hand, a stack of
addressed envelopes before him. He shifted his chair round and his
eyebrows rose in astonishment.

“Hello!” he said, obviously taken aback by the character of the call.
“Do you want to see me again, Inspector?”

Coldwell took in the room at a glance.

“I have information that you’ve a gun concealed under this floor,” he
said. “If you don’t mind I’ll make another search.”

“Fire ahead,” said Peter, without a moment’s hesitation.

Coldwell turned back to the door, lifted a corner of the faded carpet
and saw the loose board immediately. To lift it up was the work of a
second. Thrusting in his hand, he pulled out a long black Browning
pistol. Peter’s face went white; his jaw dropped in an amazement that
could not have been simulated.

“Anything more here?” asked Coldwell, and, kneeling, thrust in his
hand and groped about. Presently he found a small package wrapped in
cloth and brought it to the light. He unwrapped it slowly.

“My stars!” gasped out a hollow voice.

Mrs. Inglethorne had crept up the stairs and was an interested
spectator. There was reason enough for her astonishment, for in the
centre of that dirty rag lay three large diamond rings, the least
valuable of which must have been worth a hundred pounds.

“Do you know anything about these, Dawlish?”

Peter shook his head.

“No, I’m not a burglar,” he said, with a return of his old good
spirits. “That branch of the profession is not my forte, and that
little find has every appearance of being the proceeds of a very old
burglary.”

Coldwell looked at the wrapper; it was thick with dust. Even as he
turned back one corner of the rag, a fine cloud arose.

“Do you know anything about these, Mrs. Inglethorne?”

She shook her head.

“Or the pistol?”

The woman was paralyzed; her face had gone a ghastly gray as she
realized the enormous significance of that find. There they had lain
month after month, at least five hundred pounds’ worth of jewellery,
the results of one of her lodger’s little coups, and she none the
wiser.

“Never--seen--it!” Mrs. Inglethorne found a difficulty in breathing.

“This has been used as a hiding place before,” said the inspector, as
he laid the pistol and rings upon the deal table.

He examined the Browning, noted its make and number, and, having
carefully removed the magazine and dislodged the cartridges from the
chamber, smelled at the barrel.

“It has been fired recently, I should imagine: it still smells of
cordite. Is this yours, Dawlish?”

“No, sir: I’ve never seen it before.”

“Humph!” The inspector sat down on the bed in exactly the place where
the girl had sat the night before. He looked round for Mrs.
Inglethorne, but that woman had vanished.

“Nobody told you about that hiding place?”

“No, sir.”

“Hello, Elizabeth!” It was Leslie’s interruption. The frail child
stood in the doorway, shyly smiling at the beautiful lady of her
dreams.

She whispered something that the girl could not catch, and Leslie went
nearer to her, took the two thin hands in hers, and, stooping, kissed
the pale cheeks.

“Tea?” she said with a laugh. “No, dear, I don’t think we want tea. It
was very nice of you to come.”

The child’s eyes were fixed on the table; they were wide open, and in
their depths Leslie saw a look of fear.

“What is it?” asked Leslie.

“That big gun,” whispered the child. “Mother had it this morning, and
I was so frightened.”

The sharp-eared Coldwell heard.

“Your mother had it this morning, my dear?” he said kindly. “Where did
she have it?”

“In the kitchen. A gentleman left it--a little gentleman with a yellow
face. Mother brought it into the kitchen and said we all ought to be
killed.”

She clapped her hands to her mouth with an exclamation of fright, for
only then did she remember the strict injunctions laid upon her.
Coldwell strode out of the room to the head of the stairs and called
Mrs. Inglethorne in a stentorian voice. It was a long time before he
had an answer, and then by the tremulous voice he guessed that part of
the conversation between himself and the child had been overheard.

“Come up here,” he said curtly, and Mrs. Inglethorne came lumbering up
the stairs.

“This pistol came to your house this morning. From whom?”

The woman’s mouth was dry with terror. She blinked from one to the
other.

“A gentleman brought it,” she gasped out. “He said it belonged to Mr.
Dawlish, and would I put it under the floor--without a word of a lie,
sir--if I never move from here.”

Coldwell’s gimlet eyes searched her unwholesome face.

“You told me you had never seen the pistol before. Who sent it?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know, sir. I’ve never seen the man before in my life--if I
never move----”

“You’ll move!” said Coldwell grimly. “And darned quick, if you don’t
tell me the truth!”

But to her story she stuck, swearing by numerous gods, some of whom
were unfamiliar to Leslie, that she knew nothing whatever of the
pistol except that it had been brought there by a perfect stranger who
she thought was a friend of Peter Dawlish.

To Leslie Maughan’s astonishment the inspector appeared to accept this
story, and to find nothing venal in the act of concealment.

“You did a very foolish thing, Mrs. Inglethorne. The next time a
perfect stranger comes and asks you to conceal firearms in your
lodger’s room, you had better notify the police.”

He slipped the pistol into his pocket, and looked round for Elizabeth,
but she had vanished.

“That lets you out, Dawlish,” he said. “At least, it does for the
moment. If I were you, I would make an inspection of the room and see
if there are other likely hiding places where stuff could be planted.”

He had a consultation with the local inspector, and then he and Leslie
walked back to their cab.

“You’ve let her down rather lightly, haven’t you, Mr. Coldwell?”

He gave her a quick sidelong glance.

“Minnow fishing never did appeal to me,” he drawled, “especially while
one of the big pikes is hovering around, and it’s the pike I’m after.
And if this minnow doesn’t lead me to him, I’ll be astonished.”

“You accept Peter Dawlish’s story?”

He nodded, as he helped her into the cab. When he had followed and had
slammed the rackety door and the machine was in motion, he explained.

“The detective who searched the house last night found that loose
board and the hole underneath. He might have missed the diamond rings,
but he couldn’t have missed the gun. Therefore I knew it had been
planted since. Peter might have put it there, of course, but the odds
were all against that theory. The true story was the one told by the
child. The little yellow-faced gentleman was probably one of the three
who attacked Dawlish.”

For the first time she learned of that surprising outrage which had
been committed in Severall Street the night Peter had visited her.

He admitted a little irritably that the case had gone outside his own
experience.

“Here’s a woman who has been masquerading as a man for the past
fifteen years, found dead, with an emerald in her hand, worth, at a
rough guess, a thousand pounds. She was shot at close quarters with
the pistol I have in my pocket----”

She gasped.

“You don’t mean that?”

He nodded.

“I do mean it. I’d like to bet a month’s pay that I’m right. You think
a murderer would be crazy to put the very weapon in the hands of the
police, knowing that the pistol has a number and its purchase can be
traced--unless it was bought in Belgium, which is extremely likely.
You haven’t seen Druze since she was found, have you? Well, I’m not
advising you to; all the details about her can be passed on. There’s a
big black-powder burn at the base of her right thumb, that is to say
on the back of her hand. First thing I noticed when I examined the
body was that powder burn.”

“How did that come there?” asked Leslie.

“She fired an automatic--five or six shots in rapid succession--and
got the backfire. One shot wouldn’t have burned her; it must have been
at least five. Look!” He showed his own hand, and a raw red mark,
faintly tinged with black. “I was firing an automatic this morning to
see what would happen, and I’ve got exactly the same mark as she has.
I’m only making a guess, Leslie, but my guess is that Miss or Mrs.
Druze was killed in self-defense; that she started the gunplay and got
the worst of it.”

Leslie caught her breath.

“Then where is the other body?” she asked quickly.

He stared at her open-mouthed.

“Other body?”

“She killed somebody first,” said Leslie quickly. “Killed or
desperately wounded. Such a woman as Druze would not carry a pistol
unless she knew how to use it. If she knew how to use it and fired
first, then somebody was badly hurt.”

The old man took off his hat and scratched his head.

“That’s the natural conclusion to reach,” he said, “and I didn’t reach
it! And why I didn’t reach it I don’t know! Just let me think this
out, will ye?”

The silence was unbroken until they reached Scotland Yard.

“I’m still thinking it out,” he said dismally as he stepped out of the
cab behind her and paid the taxi man.

There was a bearded man in the hall, doctor written in every line of
him. He was talking to the officer at the desk, and evidently Coldwell
was being pointed out to him, for he walked to the door to meet the
inspector as he entered.

“You’re Mr. Coldwell? My name is Simmson. I am Doctor Simmson of
Marylebone Road.”

“Yes, Doctor?” said Coldwell, politely attentive.

“A friend of mine has suggested that I should go to Scotland Yard and
report rather a curious circumstance,” he said awkwardly. “I have
never done such a thing before, and I’m a little at sea as to how I
should begin. But I have a patient who is suffering from a gunshot
wound, and I am not quite satisfied as to how she received her injury,
which is a slight one.”

Coldwell was all attention now.

“Through the calf; no artery has been injured. And really, I feel I’m
being terribly disloyal to a patient----”

“What is her name?” asked Coldwell.

“Mrs. Greta Gurden,” was the reply.




 CHAPTER XI.
 THE DOCUMENT

The apartment that Greta Gurden occupied was on the first floor of a
house in Portman Crescent. Hers was one of those artistic little flats
that reflected every taste but her own. She slept in a red lacquer
bed, ornamented by golden devils, a bargain acquired many years before
in the Caledonian Market, and renovated by her own hands. Life is
rather a tragedy for the lonely woman; there was a shadowy husband
very much in the background, but he had either run away from her or
was in a lunatic asylum or something equally unsatisfactory. She was
one of the thousands who were endeavouring to keep an expensive
establishment on an insufficient income. By profession she was a
journalist; edited a mildly scurrilous little paper called _Mayfair
Gossip_ which enjoyed a very limited circulation, and in truth took up
very little of her time. It was certainly not in the paper’s interest
that she fostered the delusion that her life was one of hectic gayety.
For she was to be seen occasionally at the most exclusive night clubs;
more frequently at less exclusive establishments of the same order,
her visitations being governed entirely by the wealth and taste of her
escort. And numerically she had many friends. Her expansiveness and
lack of reticence had been tersely and uncharitably condemned into the
vulgar word “gush.” Still, however it might sicken the more
sophisticated, it was very pleasant to those who discovered from her
for the first time how important or good looking or well dressed they
were, what taste, discrimination, or tact they displayed upon every
conceivable occasion, and how anxiously or impatiently Greta was
looking forward to their next meeting.

There were young men who took her out to dinner or to supper or to
dances. There were middle-aged men, fathers of families, whose hearts
she fluttered with the promise of adventure never to be fulfilled, who
escorted her to the less expensive places of popular amusement. There
were, too, women who hovered everlastingly on that no-man’s-land
between Suburbia and Mayfair, who courted her society and influence,
under the mistaken impression that she had the entrée to the most
select circles.

_Mayfair Gossip_ was entirely the property of Anita Bellini, and it
was an unprofitable concern, a fact Anita never failed to emphasize,
when Greta called on a Friday for her weekly stipend, her only regular
source of income. The princess was good to Greta in other ways. She
gave her an occasional dinner, a discarded dress or two, marched her
off to afternoon concerts, and employed her as a sort of unpaid
secretary. Occasionally, windfalls came the way of Greta Gurden--fifty
pounds here and there for some little service which she had rendered.
And she had always a use for the money. There were new curtains to
buy, a fascinating Chinese cabinet, or something that looked like a
fascinating Chinese cabinet, a carved ivory Madonna--a fair copy of a
master’s art. She had a passion for picking up entirely useless
articles. Her dining room was cluttered up with imitation oak.
Birmingham-made suits of chain armour, Benares brass from the same
enterprising city, a gutted spinet that served only as a sideboard for
the display of imitation Bristol ware. There was even a pair of
antlers over the doorway, and Greta was not above suggesting to her
awe-stricken visitors that the twelve-pointer had been shot by her
when she was the guest of the Duke of Blank at his little hunting box
in Inverness-shire.

She enjoyed the services of one who was charlady in the morning and
maid in the afternoon, and only to this unemotional lady was the real
Greta ever revealed.

Mrs. Gurden lay in bed with a bandaged leg. Torn between terror that
memory brought and fear of blood-poisoning and its horrible
consequences--among other duties she contributed the health notes to
_Mayfair Gossip_--she was a difficult patient.

Greta could not afford to neglect her daily duty to herself. Her face
was indistinguishable under a mud pack, designed to preserve the face
from the ravages of age, and her hands were inclosed in complexion
gloves. Two dark eyes glared oddly from the mask of gray, and she
spoke with some difficulty, due to the dried earth that plastered her
cheeks. Just now she had an additional reason for annoyance.

“Tell her I can’t see her and I won’t see her. Tell her to come back
at twelve o’clock.”

“She’s from Scotland Yard, ma’am.”

“I don’t care; I won’t see her.”

The obedient charlady disappeared into the outer room. Greta heard the
murmur of voices, and after a while the woman came back.

“She says she’ll wait till you’re ready. She wants to know how you
hurt your leg.”

Greta had no need to stifle her fury. A sudden panic descended upon
her.

“Bring me some hot water.”

It took some time to remove the renovating mud, a little longer time
to substitute perfumed creams and powder. A brief glimpse through an
open door had revealed to Leslie Maughan the cause of the delay. She
waited patiently, having some sympathy with woman’s losing fight
against the ravages of time and care. When at length she was admitted,
it was the old Greta who smiled ecstatically.

“My dear! How wonderfully good of you to come! So sweet of you! I was
so hoping that I should have another opportunity of meeting you. The
princess is rather difficult, isn’t she? I did so want to have a
little chat with you the last time we met. I admire your style
awfully. Won’t you sit down somewhere? Yes, I’ve had an awful
accident. I was cleaning my husband’s pistol and it went off, but
fortunately no bones were broken.”

“Where did this happen?”

It was on the tip of Greta’s tongue to say “here,” but she thought
better of it.

“At a country house where I was staying for the week-end. People are
so careless. Imagine leaving a pistol loaded! I nearly died of
fright!”

“What country house was this?” asked Leslie.

Greta knit her brows.

“What was the name of the place? I don’t know the people very well.
Somewhere in Berkshire.”

“Was your husband there, Mrs. Gurden?”

“Er--no--but he had been staying at the place; left his box behind. I
was rummaging through it and found his pistol, and it looked so
awfully rusty and dirty that I thought I would clean it.”

“Who else was hurt besides you?” asked Leslie quietly.

Greta shot a swift, suspicious glance at the girl.

“Nobody, thank goodness!” she said.

Leslie waited a second, then:

“Was this before or after Druze was killed?”

Under the rouge Greta’s face went suddenly gray and pinched. She sat
bolt upright in bed and stared at the girl.

“Dead?” she said huskily. “Druze is dead? It’s a lie!”

“Druze is dead! She was found last night on Barnes Common--shot!”

“‘She?’” The woman’s forehead was puckered into lines. “‘She?’ What
are you talking about? I was speaking of Druze.”

“So was I,” said Leslie. “Druze was a woman; you know that.”

The open mouth, the wide eyes, every visible expression of amazement
revealed without question Greta Gurden’s ignorance of the “butler’s”
sex.

“A woman! Good heavens!”

She sank back on the pillows, exhausted by her emotion, her eyes fixed
on the ceiling. But for those wide-open pools of darkness, Leslie
would have thought that the woman had fainted. Presently she spoke.

“I’ve nothing to tell you. I shot myself by accident. I know nothing
about Druze--nothing. Why should I? The accident occurred when I was
in the country. I won’t talk to you! I won’t!”

She almost screamed the words.

Leslie realized that it would be cruel to question her more closely;
the woman was so distressed that she might have hesitated even if she
had not feared the effects of a further cross-examination upon one who
was in the surgeon’s hands.

“I will come along and see you when you’re a little better, Mrs.
Gurden,” she said.

Greta made no answer.

As Leslie’s cab turned out of the street, it passed a big car swinging
round to enter the unpretentious thoroughfare, and the girl had a
glimpse of the princess. She wished now that on some pretext or other
she had stayed, that she might see the meeting between these two.

Anita Bellini mounted the stairs and, entering the apartment without
knocking, summarily dismissed the charwoman, and Mrs. Hobbs, not
unused to such cavalier treatment, departed meekly.

“Has Maughan been here?” she demanded, as she strode into Greta’s
room.

Her eyes narrowed as she caught sight of the haggard face.

“I see she has,” she said grimly. “What did she come about?”

Greta raised herself on her elbow and pushed up her pillow to support
her; she was trembling so that after a second she rolled back on the
pillow with a groan.

“She wanted to know how I was wounded,” she said at last.

“What did you tell her?” asked the princess impatiently. “For Heaven’s
sake pull yourself together, my good woman! How did she know you were
wounded, anyway? Did you send an announcement to the newspapers?”

“I don’t know how she knew, but she did. I told her that it was an
accident, that I was cleaning my husband’s pistol and it went off.
Anita, is it true?”

“Is what true?” asked the princess roughly.

“Is it true that Druze is dead?”

“Yes.”

“And that she was a woman?”

“I thought you guessed,” said the Princess Anita. “Of course she was a
woman.”

“My stars, how awful!”

Anita Bellini’s cold glance transfixed the invalid.

“What is the matter with you?” she demanded harshly. “Druze was----”

She stopped short.

“How long are you going to be in bed?”

Greta shook her head.

“I don’t know; the doctor says another week at least.”

“Did you tell her anything more? Really, Greta, you’re not to be
trusted, though I never dreamed that nosy little devil would find out
about your being shot. I suppose the doctor reported it.”

She stared down at the woman speculatively.

“I suppose I’d better give you some money,” she said, with no great
enthusiasm. “You look awful, you know that? You’re not wearing well,
Greta. All the mud in the world will not take those wrinkles from
under your eyes. Why, you’re old.”

The red in Greta Gurden’s face was natural: it came and went. Fury
blazed in the dark eyes, for now Anita Bellini had touched her upon
the rawest place of Greta’s self-esteem and put into words, at this
incongruous moment, all that this poor little _poseuse_ feared. But it
was Anita Bellini’s way, to go off at spiteful tangents, to sting and
hurt those from whom she expected unswerving loyalty. It was
characteristic of her that at this moment, when her mind and spirit
were tensed to meet the very real dangers which threatened her, she
could go out of her way to humiliate her creature.

“You aren’t able to attend to _Gossip_, of course. You’re having the
letters sent here?” she asked, and, when the woman nodded silently:
“The last batch were valueless; there was a little bit about the
Debouson woman, but I knew all about that. She isn’t worth a penny; in
fact, there’s a bankruptcy petition out against her husband. You had
better write a spicy paragraph about her; that is all the information
is worth.”

She was walking about the room as she spoke, stopping now and again to
look, with a contemptuous lift of her lips, at the tawdriness of the
imitations with which the room was stocked.

“I’m going to Capri in the spring,” she said. “The new villa has been
bought; I suppose I’d better take you along with me.”

She did not see the malignity that shot from the dark eyes.

“The paper will have to go. It is becoming more and more useless. If
you had had a spark of genius in you, Greta, you would have made that
into a property. You are sure you told that detective girl nothing?”

“Nothing,” said Greta, regaining control of her voice.

“What is this?”

Anita had stopped before a big secretaire, pulled down the flap and
was examining a number of letters neatly tied in bundles.

“Are those the papers of mine that I asked you to put in order?”

“Yes.”

The princess detached one letter from a bundle, read it and tossed it
back.

“Most of these things can be burned,” she said. “You found nothing of
importance?”

“No, nothing.”

Something in Greta’s tone made the other turn her head.

“What’s the matter with you?”

And then the pent-up fury of Greta Gurden burst forth. She was sobbing
with rage, almost unintelligible in her anger.

“You treat me as if I was a servant--patronizing! I hate your beastly
way of talking to me! I’m not a dog. I’ve served you like a slave for
twelve years, and I won’t be talked to as you talk to me. I won’t! I’d
sooner starve in the gutter! I suppose I am getting old. I know I am,
but you needn’t throw it in my face. You’re always talking about my
looks. If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all. I’m tired
of it.”

“Don’t be a fool!” scoffed the princess. “And don’t be hysterical.
You’ve got your future to consider and you’re not going to help by
quarrelling with me. You can’t go back to the chorus.”

“That’s the sort of horrible thing you would say,” stormed Greta. “I
think you’re loathsome! I won’t do another stroke of work for you.”

She ended in a passion of weak tears, and Anita Bellini did not
attempt to mollify her. She knew from past experience that in an hour
or two she would have a penitent message from her slave asking
forgiveness for this outburst; for this was not the first time that
Greta had revolted, only to come to heel at the snap of Anita’s whip.

With this assurance she took her ungracious leave, and had hardly left
the street before all thought of Greta was out of her mind. The
Princess Anita Bellini had other matters, more weighty, to think of.


There was very little for Leslie Maughan to tell to her chief, but he
did not seem greatly disappointed.

“We’ll leave her alone for a while. If you once start badgering these
people, they build up an unbreakable alibi, and that’s bad for trade.”

He looked glumly at the trunks in the corner of his room.

“We’d better dispose of these,” he said. “I’ll get in a clerk to write
down the inventory as you call them out.”

He rang for his secretary, the girl who had taken Leslie Maughan’s
place on her promotion, and, stooping before the first of the cabin
trunks, he unlocked it and threw back the lid. For half an hour Leslie
was lifting out articles of wearing apparel, and one little mystery
was solved when she came upon a parcel of men’s clothing. They were of
the ready-to-wear type, the parts roughly tacked. One of them,
however, must have been fitted, for it was partly sewed, and a small
tailor’s roll in a pocket of the trunk explained how Druze had avoided
the embarrassment of a tailor’s fitting. She was evidently a good
sewing woman, for the half-finished garment was beautifully tailored.
There was nothing, however, in the first trunk that threw any light
upon the mystery of her death.

The second box held a surprise: it was filled with women’s clothing.

“She was going to drop her disguise when she got to the United
States,” Leslie concluded, and with this view Mr. Coldwell agreed.

At last the second box was emptied, but again there was nothing that
could afford the slightest clue.

“There’s a suitcase; we only discovered it this morning; it was in the
parcels office at Waterloo,” said Coldwell.

He opened a cupboard and took out a crocodile skin travelling grip and
put it on the table. It was locked, but suitcase locks respond to
almost any key, and at the second attempt it was opened. Here the girl
found such articles as she would expect an ocean traveller to carry:
sponge bag, soap, a small jewel case containing a gold watch and
guard, a diamond-encircled wrist watch, and a small diamond bar
brooch. A silk dressing gown, a pair of slippers, and a few odds and
ends completed the contents.

“Nothing here,” said Leslie.

She ran her hand round the silken lining of the case and suddenly her
fingers stopped. She felt a thin, oblong package under the silk.
Reaching out, she took Coldwell’s scissors from his desk and cut
through the silk. Inserting her fingers, she drew forth an envelope.
It was closed and bore no inscription. She tore off the end and drew
out an oblong document. It was a marriage certificate, performed
apparently by the Reverend H. Hermitz, of Elfield, Connecticut.

“Good heavens!” said the startled Coldwell, reading over her shoulder.

For a moment the words swam before the eyes of the girl, and then out
of the blur they appeared with staggering clearness. It was a document
certifying that Peter James Dawlish had been joined in holy matrimony
with Jane Winifred Hood--and Hood was Lady Raytham’s maiden name!

She read it again, then put the document into the inspector’s hands.

“Then they were married!” she said evenly. “That was the thing I
wasn’t sure about.”




 CHAPTER XII.
 PETER’S MOTHER

Peter found it very difficult to concentrate his mind upon his work,
and although his task was purely mechanical he stopped from time to
time and allowed his thoughts to wander. Inevitably they wandered
toward that gray building on the Thames Embankment, and a room
somewhere in its dark interior where a girl was sitting. He could see
her face very clearly. He sighed and took up his pen again, and cursed
himself for the folly of dreams.

Far better for him, he thought, that, if he could not concentrate upon
his work, he let his mind go roving westward to the bleak moor and
those ugly prison buildings that are set in a fold of it; to the
carved sneer on the stone arch under which he had walked heavy-footed
toward the golden-bearded warder who stood by the iron gates and
counted the prisoners in and out; to the long, smelly “ward,” and the
vaultlike cells with their gayly coloured blankets; to the stretch of
bog land from which the convict workers returned soaked to the skin to
their lukewarm dinners; to the barnlike laundry, the silent punishment
cells, and the cracked asphalt where the prisoners walked in a ring on
Sunday mornings. An ugly memory, but at least one of accomplishment,
and substantially past. It was much better than letting your fancies
go straying toward the straight figure of a girl with violet eyes and
red lips that curved everlastingly in laughter.

He had reached the S’s in the list, the Simpsons and Sims and
Sinclairs. It was ill-paid work, his employer being a bookmaker of
dubious probity; but so far as he was concerned, he had been paid
something in advance, and he had been promised another job to follow.

Very resolutely he had dismissed from his mind all thought of his
mother. Even in Dartmoor he had excluded her from his thoughts. If he
remembered at all, it was by the letter that had come to him on the
day of his conviction. His father had died that week; he had been
sinking for months and had never been conscious of his son’s shame.
That had been Peter’s one comfort, until he received his mother’s
letter, telling him that in a lucid hour of consciousness old Donald
Dawlish had struck his name from his will. So Peter went down from the
dock with the bitterness of death in his heart; beside that knowledge
of his father’s last act, the seven years’ sentence was as nothing.

At six o’clock Elizabeth brought him his tea. She was unusually solemn
and silent, and when he attempted to start a little conversation with
her, she was so embarrassed that he did not attempt to pursue this
course.

He went out for an hour, strolling through the Lambeth Cut amid a
medley of hawkers’ stalls with their glaring acetylene lights. He had
some comfort from this contact with his fellows. As he returned, he
was opening the door of the house with a key which the woman had given
him that day, when he remembered that he had not seen Mrs. Inglethorne
since the visitation of the police.

He went upstairs, lit the oil lamp and, putting a paper bag full of
biscuits which he had bought on the table before him, he settled down
to his task. Eight o’clock was striking when he heard the squeaking of
brakes as a motor car stopped before the door, and, going to the
window, he pulled aside the shade and looked down. It was too dark to
distinguish the visitor, but his heart leaped at the thought that it
might be Leslie Maughan and he opened the door and waited. This time
he heard Mrs. Inglethorne’s voice and after a while she called up to
him sourly:

“A lady to see you, Mr. Dawlish.”

“Will you ask her to come up, please?”

He went back into the room and waited. The step on the stairs was
slower and heavier than Leslie’s. And then there came through the open
doorway the last woman in the world he expected to see--his mother.

Her cold eyes went from him to the littered table.

“Fine work for the son of a gentleman!” she said in a hard voice.

“I’ve known worse,” he replied coolly.

She closed the door behind her, as though she knew something of Mrs.
Inglethorne’s irrepressible curiosity.

“I never expected I should see you again,” she said, declining with a
gesture the chair he pushed forward to her; “but having given the
matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that I ought to do
something for you. I am buying and stocking a small farm for you in
western Canada, and I am making you a small allowance to enable you to
live, even if the farm fails, as it probably will. You will leave for
Quebec on Saturday week; I have booked a second-class passage for
you.”

And, when he was about to speak:

“I don’t want you to thank me. I shall feel happier when you have left
the country. You have brought everlasting disgrace upon your father’s
name, and I do not wish to be reminded constantly of the fact.”

Here she stopped.

“You were altogether wrong when you thought I was about to thank you,”
he said quietly. “In the first place, I have no intention of accepting
your charity, and in the second place I have no aptitude for farming
either in Canada or in England.”

“I have booked your passage,” she said, with an air of finality.

“Then there will be a vacant bed going cheap on the Atlantic Ocean!”
replied Peter, with a smile.

She looked round the room contemptuously and again her eyes went to
the table.

“So you’d rather do this waster’s work?”

“Waster’s work, I agree,” he said, “but infinitely more intellectual
than mending boots or washing convicts’ laundry--my last occupation. I
expect nothing from you, Mother. For some reason which I have never
quite understood, you have hated me ever since I was a child. I have
no wish to reproach you with being ‘unnatural.’ You have been under
the thumb of Anita Bellini ever since I can remember.”

“How dare you!” Her voice was vibrant with anger. “‘Under the thumb!’
What do you mean?”

“I only know that Anita Bellini has withered every good feeling in
every good woman who has been brought into contact with her. I only
know that she is evil; what hold she has over you, Heaven knows. It
has been sufficiently strong to rob me of the one gift which is every
man’s right--a mother’s love. I dare say that sounds a piece of sickly
sentimentality, but it is a big thing--a very big thing.”

“You have had what you deserved,” she interrupted brusquely. “And I
did not come here to discuss my duty. If you prefer to go to Australia
instead of Canada----”

“I prefer Lambeth to either place at the moment,” he said coldly.

She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.

“You have made your bed and you must lie on it. I have done all that
is humanly possible, more than could be expected, remembering how you
have humiliated me and made my name----”

“My father’s name,” he corrected.

He got under her guard there, and to his wonder the comment to which
irritation drove him produced a remarkable effect. Her face flushed;
the hard mouth grew harder.

“Your father’s name is my name,” she said harshly.

Her eyes were blazing; he had never seen her so moved.

“I will give you twenty thousand pounds to leave the country,” she
said. “That is my final offer.”

He shook his head.

“I shall never want money from you,” he said, and, walking to the
door, opened it and she left the room without another glance at him.

Why had she come? He wasted half an hour of precious time puzzling
over this extraordinary action on her part. He had spoken no more than
the truth, when he had said that from his childhood she had displayed
an antagonism toward him which in maturity had puzzled him more than
any other experience in his life. Antagonistic? She hated him! And,
curiously enough, his father had known of her feeling, and though he
had never made any direct reference to the enmity, had gone out of his
way to make up for the affection the mother denied him. It was his
father with whom he had corresponded throughout the days of the war;
his father who had met him when he came home from France on leave; his
father who had come day after day to the hospital to sit by the
bedside of his wounded son; and when Peter had been discharged from
the army, it was Donald who found him the secretaryship and had
planned for him a great career in the world of politics. It was a
puzzle beyond unravelment. Peter took up his pen again and tried, by a
concentration of his exigent present, to forget the bitter past.




 CHAPTER XIII.
 PETER TELLS

It was twelve o’clock when he put down his pen and rubbed his
cramped hands. Throwing up the window to let out the smoke, he munched
a biscuit and meditated; and then his face brightened, and his
thoughts went unresistingly toward Leslie Maughan. Then through the
open window he heard unsteady steps coming along the paved sidewalk.
They paused before the door of the house; there was a rattle of the
key. When Mrs. Inglethorne went out at night, she usually returned
with that same unsteady footstep. Presently the door slammed, and her
muttering came up to him from the passage.

Usually she did not go out nights, but stayed at home to receive the
curious callers who came at odd moments. They always knocked once with
the knocker and once with the flat of their hands, and generally they
carried a parcel or package, big or small. There was a whispered
colloquy in the passage, the chink of money, or, more rarely, the
rustle of treasury notes, and they went out again--without their
parcels. This, Peter had seen and had not seen. Prison had taught him
the wisdom of blindness, and he had not spoken to Mrs. Inglethorne of
the furtive men and women who came slinking down Severall Street at
those hours when the police patrol was well out of the way.

Leslie Maughan! He smiled a little at the thought of her, more at his
own madness. What barriers separated them--barriers more real, more
invincible, than the difference between Scotland Yard and Dartmoor
Prison! It was worse than madness to think about her!

The scream that brought him to his feet was shrill and charged with
fear and mortal agony. In two strides he was at the door and had
pulled it wide open.

Now he heard it plainly--the whistle and fall of a whip, the
terrified, frantic cries for mercy. He ran down the stairs in the dark
and tapped at Mrs. Inglethorne’s door. From inside the room came a
deep, heartbreaking sound of sobbing.

“Who’s that?” asked Mrs. Inglethorne defiantly. “Go away and mind your
own business!”

“Open the door, or I’ll break it open!” cried Peter in a cold fury.

“I’ll send for the police if you interfere with me!” yelled the woman.

His answer was to throw his weight against the flimsy door. The catch
broke with a snap, and he was in the foul bedroom. Elizabeth lay
cowering on a filthy camp bed, clad only in a coarse nightdress. Her
head was pillowed in the crook of her arm, and convulsive sobs shook
the thin shoulders. Her face aflame, Mrs. Inglethorne stood at the
foot of a big brass bedstead, one hand holding herself steady, the
other grasping an old dog whip.

“I’ll learn her to go talking about me!” she said thickly. “After all
I’ve done for her!”

There was another child there, a girl who was apparently the same age
as Elizabeth. She, however, enjoyed the luxury of Mrs. Inglethorne’s
ample bed and was so used to this exhibition of the woman’s wrath that
she was asleep.

“Where is your coat, Elizabeth?” asked Peter gently.

The child looked up, her eyes swollen, her face red, and cast one
fearful glance at her mother.

“Watcher goin’ to do?” asked Mrs. Inglethorne unsteadily.

“She will sleep in my room for the night,” replied Peter. “To-morrow I
will make other arrangements for her, and if you give any trouble I
shall send for the police.”

Mrs. Inglethorne was amused in her way.

“Send for the police!” she scoffed. “I like that! An old lag sending
for the police! And they’ll come, won’t they?”

“I think so,” said Peter quietly. “They will come, if only to discover
why you never use the back room upstairs as a bedroom, why it is
always kept locked, except after your visitors’ calls.”

The smile died from the woman’s face.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Peter went on, “you can ‘fence’ till the
cows come home! But I’m not going to have you beating this child while
I’m in the house. And when I’m out of it, and out of it for good, I’ll
see that she is well looked after!”

The woman’s face was mottled with fear.

“Fence!” she spluttered. “I don’t know what you mean by that low word!
If you mean I receive stolen property, then you’re a liar!”

“Let me call the police and settle the matter,” said Peter.

The threat sobered her.

“I don’t want any police in my house. The kid annoyed me, and it’s a
hard thing if a mother can’t cane her own children without being
interfered with. If she wants to sleep upstairs, she can, but she’d be
better off down here, Mr. Dawlish. You haven’t got any accommodation
for a little gel.”

This was true.

“All right, get into bed, Elizabeth.” He covered her up with the
pitifully thin bedclothes, and without apology took Mrs. Inglethorne’s
heavy coat that lay over the bed rail and put it on top. “Sleep well,”
he said, and patted her cheek.

She was safe for the night. What happened in the morning depended
entirely on the view which Leslie Maughan took of a scheme that was
beginning to take definite shape.

Mrs. Inglethorne was a fence, a buyer of stolen property. He had lived
too long in association with the worst criminals of England to have
any doubt upon the point, and, squinting through the keyhole one day
in his curiosity, he had seen enough to remove the last remnants of
doubt that remained.

He went to bed, determined to interview Leslie at the earliest
opportunity, and it was not only on Elizabeth’s account that the
thought pleased him.

When he arrived at the flat in Charing Cross Road next morning,
Lucretia did not recognize him, and scowled fearfully at the
suggestion that he should be admitted. She looked at his shabby attire
and shook her head.

“It’s no good your trying to see Miss Maughan. You’d better call on
her at Scotland Yard. She’s very busy now.”

“Who is it, Lucretia?”

Leslie was leaning over the rails of the landing; she could not see
the visitor, but she could hear the uncompromising note in Lucretia’s
voice.

“A young man wants to see you, miss. What’s your name again? Dawlish.”

“Oh, is that you, Peter Dawlish? Come up, will you?”

Peter ran up the stairs, followed by the muttered protests of the
maid.

“You’re in time for breakfast. How are the envelopes going?”

“They’re melting!” he said.

He was conscious of a certain indefinable change in her tone. It was
not that she was more serious, but there seemed some listlessness
about her, as though she were tired. It was almost an effort to talk.
She looked weary, he saw, when they passed from the dark landing, and
he commented on this.

“I’ve been up half the night,” she said, “wandering about in a very
cold garden, watching an elderly lady searching the ground with an
electric lamp. That sounds mysterious, doesn’t it?”

She pointed to a chair and Peter sat down.

“It sounds almost romantic. Where was this?”

“At Wimbledon.” She waved the matter out of discussion. “Well,” she
asked, “what brings you to West Central London at this unholy hour?”

Her grave eyes were fixed on his; there was something of reproach in
them, something of hurt. He was puzzled; he felt that he had fallen
short in her estimation, that she was disappointed with him for some
reason. So strong was this impression that he grew uncomfortable under
her gaze, and as though she were aware of this, she dropped her eyes
to the table and began slowly to stir her coffee.

“I’ve come on a fool errand, with a wild and impossible suggestion.”

And then he told her of what had happened overnight, of the merciless
flogging which Mrs. Inglethorne had administered.

“The woman is a fence,” he said, “not in a very big way. I think she
specializes in furs and silk lengths.”

She knew something of the genus fence, but he told her what he had
learned in Dartmoor, of fences who visited the scene of prospective
robberies and priced the loot, practically paying for it, before it
was stolen; of skillful men and women who would stand outside a small
jeweller’s shop and with one comprehensive glance assess the thieving
value of the whole. He told her of “dead” stores--stores which were
locked up at night, where nobody lived on the premises, and of “live”
stores, where there was either a watchman or a proprietor and his
family sleeping on the floors above.

“I am not reporting this officially--I mean the fence part of it--but
the child is ill-used. The other little kids get a whacking now and
again, but I should think she gets hers all the time.”

“What do you wish me to do?” she asked, looking up at him.

“I don’t know.” He had a sense of awkwardness. “I had a wild idea that
possibly you might be able to find--to do something with her.”

“You mean take charge of her?”

She was smiling at him.

“Yes, I suppose I did mean that,” he said after a second’s thought.
“It sounds fantastic and impossible now, but Elizabeth has got a grip
on me. Probably it is my own rather unhappy childhood which is
responding to her wretchedness.”

She laughed.

“I’ll make your mind easy, at any rate,” she said. “I had already
considered the possibility. In fact, I discussed the matter with
Lucretia last night before I went out to dinner, and Lucretia was
wildly enthusiastic. I have a spare room here; she could go to the
Catholic school in Leicester Square. The only point is that we get
Mrs. Inglethorne’s consent.”

“She had better,” he said grimly, and her lips twitched.

“Really, you’re almost ferocious when you’re taking up the causes of
other people,” she said. “I wish you’d be a little energetic in your
own.”

“Aren’t I?”

She shook her head.

“Not very,” she answered, in her quiet way. “Why don’t you see your
mother?”

He grinned.

“She saved me the trouble and came last night.”

“To Severall Street?” she asked in astonishment, and when he nodded:
“Was it--a pleasant--encounter?”

“A normally strained interview,” he answered cheerfully. “She
endeavoured to instill in me a passion for agriculture, and Canadian
agriculture at that. I love Canada. You can’t even take a week-end
trip into Canada without loving it. But the prospect of milking cows
in Saskatchewan didn’t appeal.”

“She wanted you to go abroad? Why?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I suppose she rather feels there isn’t room enough for both of us in
London.”

She thought the matter over for a minute.

“Didn’t your father leave you any money?”

“He cut me off without the proverbial shilling.”

The lightness of his tone, she suspected, was assumed. Coldwell had
told her how much Peter had loved his father.

“He altered his will at the eleventh hour--the day before I was
sentenced--and left me nothing. Poor old dear! I haven’t the slightest
grudge. How could I? He was the best father that ever lived.”

She had said she rarely smoked; she took a cigarette from her bag now
and lit it without looking at him. Indeed, for the next four minutes,
as he talked about his envelope addressing and his future, it seemed
that she was more interested in the blue vapour that floated from the
end of her cigarette than in his narrative.

“You’re unfortunate.”

She put down the cigarette, carefully took out a spoonful of coffee
from the cup and dropped it on the glowing end as it lay in the
saucer.

“You’re unfortunate, Peter Dawlish, both as a son--and as a husband!”

He did not speak.

“Terribly unfortunate,” she went on moodily. “I think you must have
been born under a very unlucky star. I’m not asking you for
confidences; you’d hate me if I did.”

Presently:

“How did you know?”

She fetched a long sigh.

“How did I know? Oh, I only knew yesterday for sure. I’d guessed for a
long time--ever since I went on my holidays into Cumberland and found
a little volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s with an inscription in
doggerel blank verse on the fly leaf. It was when I saw that the first
letter of every line reading from below, upward, made the words “Jane
Hood” that I first guessed. But I wasn’t certain--about the marriage.
There was no record at Somerset House.”

“We were married in America.”

She nodded.

“I know that now; but why?”

He stared past her out of the window. Here, she thought, was a man who
really regarded life as a terribly serious business. She was mighty
glad of that.

“Jane was very unhappy at home; her people were rotten. Her father
kept a gambling house, and her mother----” He shrugged. “I fell in
love with her. If I hadn’t been a fool I would have gone to my father
and told him the truth and then, in all probability, there would have
been no cause for unhappiness. But I was aware that he knew Jane’s
people and knew that they were rotten. We went away to America
together and were married in a little town in Connecticut. I suppose
you know that? Her father was American born. From the first day the
marriage was a ghastly mistake. Jane thought I had unlimited money. I
had to pawn her jewels to get home, and there was a fearful scene when
we landed at Liverpool. We were both a little crazy, and agreed then
and there to separate. I went back to Lord Everreed’s house to find
detectives awaiting me at the railway station. I haven’t seen or
spoken with Jane since.”

“Has she divorced you?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know. Things like that are possible in America, but I’ve had
no notification.”

Leslie bit her lip.

“If she hasn’t, she’s committed bigamy. You realize that?”

“I realize that,” he said shortly. “Which means that I cannot free
myself without betraying her; I can’t do that. I couldn’t expose her
to imprisonment.”

There was a tense and painful silence.

“Is that all?” she asked. “All you have to tell me?”

“You did not need telling, I think,” he said, a little bitterly.

“No.” She lit another cigarette; the flame of the match quivered
unsteadily. “You’re very unfortunate, Peter Dawlish.”

She blew out the match with deliberation and put it carefully in her
saucer by the side of the sodden cigarette.

“You knew nothing about Druze, of course, or you would have told me.
When did you say your father disinherited you?”

“The day before I went to prison.”

She considered this.

“Tell me, Peter! You don’t mind my calling you Peter? I feel rather
sisterly toward you just now. What was the relationship between your
father and mother? Cordial?”

He shook his head.

“No, they were never cordial; they were polite.”

She bit her lip, looking at him absently.

“Did you ever see the Princess Bellini at your father’s house?”

“Only once,” he replied. “Father disliked her----”

“She was a sort of aunt, wasn’t she?” Leslie interrupted.

“I’ve never exactly fathomed the relationship. I’ve always understood
that the Princess Bellini’s brother married my mother’s sister.”

She rose from the table abruptly, for no apparent reason.

“Peter Dawlish,” she said, and her voice shook a little in spite of
her assumption of banter, “if you were cursed with my intense
curiosity you might be a very much happier man.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you--some day. And now let us get back to our muttons; and
our muttons for the moment is poor Elizabeth. The only difficulty in
the way is Mrs. Inglethorne. As a loving mother, she may very well
object to her child being taken from her. Obviously I cannot use the
same argument as you have used. If she is a fence and a lawbreaker, it
is my duty to inform Mr. Coldwell and have her arrested. If she isn’t
a lawbreaker, we shall have to get after her from another angle. That
sounds terribly businesslike. I think I’ll go back with you to
Severall Street and see Mrs. Inglethorne myself. She may be amenable
to reason.”




 CHAPTER XIV.
 AN ARREST

They went by bus to the southern end of Westminster Bridge and
walked along York Road together. Just before they reached Severall
Street they saw a small motor truck turn into the main road, and
mechanically, Leslie, who had a weakness for such mental
registrations, turned her head to note the number. It was a favourite
trick of hers to carry fifty or sixty motor-car numbers in her head
and jot them down at the close of the day--a practice into which Mr.
Coldwell had initiated her. As she looked round she heard:

“Lady!”

A shrill voice called her.

“Who was that?” she asked, but Peter had not heard.

They reached the house and he opened the door and called Mrs.
Inglethorne, but it was one of the children who answered.

“Mother’s gone out. Her and Elizabeth.”

Sometimes the woman took the child with her when she went shopping,
Peter explained.

“I’m afraid I’ve brought you on a long job,” he said. “She may be out
for hours.”

Leaving her for a moment in the passage, he ran upstairs to his room,
intending to show her one of his small treasures, the photograph of
his dead father. He reached the head of the stairs and then stopped
aghast. The door of the mysterious locked room which adjoined his own
was wide open, and when he strode in he saw it was empty. Mrs.
Inglethorne was a quick worker, and, in the space of time between his
departure and his return, had removed all evidence of her guilt.

He went into his own room, pulled open the drawer of the table where
he kept his few treasures, and had taken out the small leather-covered
portfolio when he saw some writing on the pad--a few scribbled words
in a childish hand: “She has taken me away. Elizabeth.”

He tore off the corner of the blotting paper and went back to the
girl.

“I was afraid of this,” she said in a low voice. “Do you remember the
cry ‘lady’ as we passed the motor van? Where is the nearest telephone
booth?”

At the corner of the street was a little general shop, which had a
telephone sign, and Leslie almost ran to the shop. There was some
delay before the instrument was disengaged, but in a few minutes she
was connected with Scotland Yard and was talking to Coldwell.

“The number of the car is X.Y. 63369,” she said. “There is no doubt
whatever that it contains stolen property, but it is the little girl I
want.”

“I’ll send out a call,” was Coldwell’s reply. “We may not pick it up
before to-night; on the other hand, we may be lucky.”

“Where are you going now?” asked Peter when they were outside the
shop.

“Back to the house,” said Leslie. “I want to look at that room.”

“They cleared everything.”

She nodded.

“Thieves in a hurry are very careless people, and perhaps Mrs.
Inglethorne isn’t so clever as she imagines.”

The room was apparently bare; the only article of furniture it
contained was a long table, and by the dust marks on this Leslie was
able to judge the extent of the property that had been stored. On
either side of the rusty fireplace was a cupboard. One of these she
opened and found empty, except for a little heap of rubbish at the
bottom. The second, however, was locked. With a table knife borrowed
from the kitchen she forced back the catch and pulled open the door.
There was nothing very much there, but enough. There were three bolts
of silk, one still bearing the label of the wholesaler from whom it
had been stolen.

“Thieves in a hurry are very careless,” she said, with the light of
battle in her eyes, “and it really doesn’t matter whether Mrs.
Inglethorne is hanged for a sheep or a lamb, so long as she’s well and
truly hanged!”

She sent Peter to the police station, and went down to interview the
children. A grubby lot of little people they were, very pale, very
starved looking, except one who apparently was in charge in Mrs.
Inglethorne’s absence. She was the little girl, Leslie learned later,
who had slept in the woman’s bed, and, unlike the others, she bore a
striking facial resemblance to her mother.

“You didn’t find nothing, did you?” She was frankly hostile. “You’ve
got to be up very early to catch my old woman, missis!”

And then, turning to the silent semi-circle of children who
constituted the remainder of Mrs. Inglethorne’s family, she ordered
them peremptorily away.

“Go and play in the back yard.”

Poor little starvelings! Leslie’s heart ached to see them. She sought,
by delicate inquiry, to discover where Elizabeth had been taken, but
the preternatural cunning of the child she questioned baffled her.

Peter came back in a very short time, accompanied by a uniformed
inspector and a plain-clothes officer. They made an inspection of the
silk and carried it off with them to the station.

“This may affect you a little, Peter Dawlish,” said Leslie when they
were alone. “The children will be removed to the workhouse this
afternoon, and Mrs. Inglethorne will be arrested immediately on her
return, so that you will have the house to yourself.”

He laughed.

“I’m not depressed,” he said.

He walked with her as far as Westminster Bridge Road, and at parting
she asked him a curious question.

“What would you do if you had half a million pounds?”

He looked at her in astonishment and laughed.

“That isn’t my favourite dream,” he said. “But I think the first thing
I should do would be to send to America to discover whether I have
been, as you would say, ‘well and truly’ divorced.”

“Indeed?” Her tone was a trifle cold. “Is that necessary when Jane
Raytham is within a penny bus ride?”

And with a nod she was gone.

Peter returned to the house and found it very difficult to resume his
work or concentrate his mind upon lists. He had hardly started before
the police officials came with an omnibus to take away the children,
and they departed with no visible reluctance, except in the case of
the girl whom Leslie had interviewed.

At four o’clock in the afternoon Mrs. Inglethorne came into the house
in triumph, and without going into the kitchen mounted the stairs and
stood, arms akimbo, her red face made hideous by a self-satisfied
smirk, confronting her lodger.

“Well, did you bring in the police?” she demanded. “And what are you
going to do with Elizabeth?” And, when he did not answer, she shook
her fist at him. “Out you go, out of my house, you police informer.
I’ll learn you to go prying around and threatening me! You leave this
room at once or I’ll send for a policeman.”

“I think I’ll stay,” he said good-humouredly.

“Oh, will you?”

She went to the door and called:

“Emma.”

There was no answer.

“I can save you a lot of trouble, Mrs. Inglethorne,” said Peter,
putting down his pen. “Your children have been taken away to the
workhouse.”

She staggered back against the wall, her big mouth open wide.

“W-why?” she stammered.

“It is usual to take children to the workhouse when their parents are
arrested and there are no other relatives to look after them,” he
said.

“Arrested?” she screamed.

He nodded to the window, and she staggered past him and, pulling up
the sash, looked out. Two men were standing on the opposite sidewalk,
and one nodded as to an old friend. She recognized the detective
sergeant who had arrested her husband.

“They can’t touch me!” she screamed. “They can’t touch me! It’s my
word against yours----”

“Unfortunately you left a few bolts of silk behind in the cupboard,”
answered Peter.

Mrs. Inglethorne was in a state of collapse when the detectives came
in to arrest her.

The motor truck had been traced; the driver and a man who accompanied
the car had been driven to the nearest police station, where the
plunder was checked and exhibited in preparation for the charge which
would follow. They either could not or would not, however, give any
information concerning the child, and when Leslie went to Lambeth to
interview Mrs. Inglethorne in her cell, she was no more successful.

“Find her!” rapped the woman. “She’s in good hands, that’s where she
is. I’m not saying anything. If you want her, find her! That’s my last
word to you!”

Leslie did not notify Peter that she was coming to Lambeth. Passing up
Severall Street on her way home, she saw the light in the upstairs
window and guessed that he was still working hard. A postman rapped at
the door, and she waited a while until it was opened, as she guessed,
by Peter, and almost turned back just to say a word to him. And if she
overcame this deplorable weakness, it was not lightly done.

“Leslie Maughan,” she said to herself, mounting the steps of
Hungerford Bridge, “do you know what you are doing? Shall I tell you
in the vulgarest terms? You’re chasing a married man! Leslie, that
isn’t done! Not in the best society.”

She was uncommonly weary when she dragged herself into her own sitting
room, deciding to forgo the duty she had planned. This was a second
call upon Greta Gurden. That afternoon there had been a consultation
at Scotland Yard, but matters had not developed sufficiently to
justify the issue even of a search warrant.

After a light dinner she took out the letter she had received two
nights before, spread the foolscap on her desk and examined it
carefully. It was a queer story she read, even in the stilted
terminology of an elderly country parson, who employed such words as
“primogeniture,” and felt it necessary to sprinkle his pages with
quotations from Horace, mostly in Latin. The writer was the vicar of a
small Devonshire parish near Budleigh Salterton, and he had, as he
said in a preliminary flourish, “reached the fourscore of the
prophet.” He wasted a page in explaining how he came to reach these
years, and employed “_mens sana in corpore sano_” at least twice in
the first folio.

He knew the Druze family very well; they lived in his village and had
done so for hundreds of years. He himself had baptized Alice Mary
Druze and Annie Emily Druze, and several other members of the Druze
family which he thought it was necessary to enumerate by their full
names; it had necessitated long researches in ancient registers. The
Druze family had for generations farmed some forty acres of poor land
on the edge of Dartmoor. They were “a wild family with a bad history,”
and here the reverend gentleman, who was also something of a
scientist, branched away from the main track to a discourse upon
heredity which would have done credit to a Lombroso.

Old father Druze was a lunatic and had died mad; his grandfather had
committed suicide; there was a record in the parish registry and a
note that he had been buried at the crossroads, in the proper manner
for such as take their lives; Druze’s grandmother had also a history
of sorts. The clergyman remembered her as a “respectable woman,”
though inclined to gayety, and he even felt it necessary to retail a
hundred-year-old piece of scandal, something that had happened at
Widdicombe Fair.

Alice was illiterate; he had extracted a note of this fact from the
register of the church school. Annie, on the other hand, was a
diligent scholar “and showed surprising proficiency in the study of
the so-called dead languages,” so that she “speedily secured a
respectable situation with a haberdasher in Exeter, a Mr. Watson. She
was a God-fearing young woman, a communicant, and eventually married a
well-to-do farmer in the neighbourhood of Torquay.” The farmer’s name
Leslie jotted down on her pad.

The third of the daughters, Martha, was of an “exemplary character,
though of no great educational attainments.” About her the clergyman
was very explicit, for it was he who had obtained her a post first as
stillroom maid at a Plymouth hospital, and afterward, on his
recommendation, as a probationary nurse. It was believed that she went
to South Africa and “married a prosperous carpenter.”

When Leslie had traced Druze to that little Devonshire village, and
wrote, with no great hope, to the vicar, she hardly expected so
voluminous and conscientious a record of the family history; for he
even sent photographs of tombstones which marked the departed Druzes
of the Eighteenth Century!

If she had only read this before, she thought, she could not have been
shocked by the discovery that “Arthur Druze” was a woman; for
apparently there was no male member in that family, except the
semi-lunatic father and a remote uncle who for some reason wasn’t
called Druze at all. She read through carefully, took down an atlas
and a gazetteer from her bookshelf, and finally locked letter and data
in the drawer. Her work was by no means finished for the night, though
she was dropping with weariness. She had a number of letters to write.
Before she had left the office, Mr. Coldwell had given her the names
and addresses of a dozen people who would be helpful to her in the
search she was making.

At eleven o’clock they phoned from Scotland Yard to tell her that
there was no news of Elizabeth. Mrs. Inglethorne, confronted as she
was with a long term of imprisonment, possibly of penal servitude,
refused any information about the child, except that she had gone to
“her aunt’s.”

Lucretia brought her coffee. The girl had an irritating trick of
expressing her disapproval by audible tut-tuts, and twice did she
tut-tut into the room and out again. At last she extinguished all the
lights in the room save the table lamp.

“You’ve got to go to bed, miss,” she said firmly. “I’ll have you on my
hands if I’m not careful. And what about this young girl?”

Leslie rose stiffly from her desk, gathered the letters together and
stamped them.

“She is not coming to-night,” she said. “Post these, Lucretia. I’ll
wait for you to return and then you can go to bed.”

She heard the door open and guessed, by the cold draft that swept up
the stairs, that Lucretia had followed her usual practice of leaving
the door ajar while she went to the nearest pillar-box, which was some
distance from the flat.

It was part of the night’s routine that Lucretia should take the
letters; almost a ritual that Leslie should stand in the open doorway
of her sitting room until she heard the girl return.

The maid could not have been gone half a minute before the street door
below closed softly. She heard the gentle thud of it.

“Is that you, Lucretia?” she called down into the dark hall.

There was no reply.

Her flesh crept, for no reason that she could understand; a cold
shiver went down her spine. Leslie Maughan was not a nervous girl. Her
duty and association with Coldwell had taken her into many
uncomfortable situations, and unless it was because she was very
tired, there was no particular reason for nervousness. But her
sensation was something more than the uneasiness which comes to the
strongest nerves when they are left alone in a house. It was a
premonition, a warning, indeed a certain knowledge that there was
somebody in the hall below who should not be there.

She went back into the room, closed the door quietly and slipped in a
bolt she had had fitted. She switched on the lights that Lucretia had
extinguished, and, going to the window, pulled the curtains apart and
lifted the sash. Charing Cross Road was fairly well crowded with
people. It was a clear night and a few paces away she saw two
policemen patrolling, and presently she discerned Lucretia making her
way hurriedly across the road. The maid came beneath the window
simultaneously with a policeman; Leslie called her and she looked up.

“Tell the policemen I want them to come in,” she said. “Here is the
key--catch!”

One of the officers caught the key deftly.

“Anything wrong, miss?” he asked, knowing her.

“I think somebody has come into the house while my maid went out to
post a letter. You left the door open, did you, Lucretia?”

“Yes, miss, I did,” confessed the agitated Lucretia. “I forgot to take
the key.”

“Well, hurry----” she began.

At that moment all the lights in the room went out.

She sat on the sill and swung out her legs, her eyes fixed on the
door, which was visible in the light of a street lamp. A faint
creaking sound came to her ears and she saw the door move
slightly--the bolt was straining under some enormous pressure. Then a
voice from the pavement below hailed her.

“The street door won’t open, miss,” said the policeman’s voice.

She looked back at the door. The slot of the bolt was giving under the
strain.

“Can you catch me?” she asked.

The two men ran to the pavement beneath her.

“Jump!”

Again she looked back. At that moment, with a crash, the door opened.
She had a dim vision of two stunted figures, then, bracing her hands
on the sill, she jumped.

It was not a dignified landing, but for the moment Leslie Maughan was
less interested in her dignity than her safety. A crowd had already
gathered, attracted by the unusual happening, and there appeared from
nowhere an inspector of police, a resourceful man who, having heard
the story, immediately stopped an omnibus and ordered the driver to
bring his big machine onto the sidewalk immediately beneath the
window. Standing on the rail of the bus, one of the policemen reached
the window sill and climbed inside, and was followed by the inspector.
There was no sound of the struggle which the morbid crowd expected. A
few minutes later the door below was unbolted and Leslie and the
trembling Lucretia went into the passage.

They found the hall window on the first landing wide open. A police
whistle buzzed in the street; in a very short time the block would be
surrounded.

“No, they haven’t cut the wire, as far as I can see,” said the
inspector, examining the wall of the passage with his lamp. “Where do
you keep your fuse box?”

“I think it is near the door,” said the girl.

It proved to be within easy reach. The flat had been darkened by the
simple expedient of removing the fuses. They found them intact on the
floor and replaced them, and an inspection was possible. Except for
the broken door, no damage had been done to the flat. Whoever the
intruders were, their time had been too short to conduct a search of
the room. The drawers of the desk were untouched.

“They hadn’t much time, had they?” said the puzzled inspector. “I
can’t understand this job. If they were ordinary burglars they would
have cleared just as soon as they knew you had spotted them.”


Half an hour later, and before the police had departed, Mr. Coldwell
came on the scene. By this time every roof and yard in the vicinity
had been searched; night watchmen had been aroused from their
surreptitious sleep, and a small army of police detectives had
examined every window that might afford a possible means of escape.
But no sign of the intruders was discovered.

“I don’t like this,” said Leslie.

Mr. Coldwell shook his head.

“You’ll have to find other lodgings for a while. To-morrow you had
better transfer your belongings and Lucretia to my house at
Hampstead.”

For five minutes he discussed in a low voice the theories he had
formed, the plans he had made.

“I don’t think it is necessary to leave a policeman in the house,” he
said at last, and a little yellow man curled up on the top of the high
bureau in Leslie’s room, screened from observation by the
old-fashioned frieze of the wardrobe, was relieved.

He heard the policemen go clattering down the stairs, and after a
while:

“Just phone me if you’re at all nervous, Leslie. Good-night.”

Coldwell’s voice sounded from the hall; there was the slam of a door.
The little yellow man, who spoke and understood English very well, did
not smile to himself, because he was of a race that seldom smile.

Leslie went into her bedroom with a yawn, gathered her sleeping things
and disappeared into the bathroom. The listener heard the sound of
running water, heard her bid a reassuring good-night to the tremulous
servant, and then the door of the bedroom opened and closed. The light
was extinguished; there was the creak of a bed, and after a while the
sound of deep, regular breathing.

For an hour the yellow man lay, not moving a muscle, and then,
reaching up, he caught hold of the wooden moulding, tested its
strength, and was satisfied. He felt the long, queer-shaped knife that
was in his belt, and, with the agility of a cat, and supported only by
his sinewy fingers, he drew himself clear of the wardrobe, and dropped
noiselessly on to the carpet.

The wardrobe hardly creaked as he moved; save for the soft pad of his
bare feet and the breathing of the sleeper there was no sound. Holding
the knife lightly in his right hand, he groped along the pillow with
his left, ready to pounce upon and strangle the scream before it rose.

There was no head on the first pillow, none on the right--the bed was
empty. He straightened himself up quickly, half turned as he heard a
sound from behind him, but it was too late. An arm of steel flung
round his throat, the knife hand was gripped at the wrist and twisted
so sharply that the weapon fell to the floor.

“I want you!” It was Coldwell’s voice.

He lifted the little figure without difficulty, and reached out his
hand to turn on the light. At that moment the prisoner recovered
himself, and with amazing strength twisted round to face the
detective. Coldwell realized that he had on his hands something with
the ferocity and suppleness of a wild cat, something that growled and
clawed and kicked so that not a limb of him was still. The
unexpectedness of that furious onslaught threw him for a second off
his balance. He drove out with his right, but as though he could see
in the dark, the assassin dodged, and in another second he was free
and had flown through the open door. Coldwell followed, but too late.
With one leap the little man crashed through sash and pane and dropped
unharmed to the street below. A policeman made a dive at him, but he
ducked, flew across the road, and disappeared down a court by the side
of a theatre toward St. Martin’s Lane.

“Didn’t even see him,” said Coldwell bitterly, when he called the girl
in from Lucretia’s room. The detective’s face was scratched, his
collar torn. “It was rather like tackling a young tiger.”

Leslie had turned on the lights and they saw the extent of the damage.
He must have dived for the lower sash, head-first, for the upper
window was untouched. There was not a scrap of glass remaining, and
the cross supports of wood were smashed to splinters.

“I’ve heard of such things being done,” said Coldwell, “and I’ve seen
them done--on the stage! But never in real life and through
three-quarter inch moulding!”

Leslie was still dressed. She had been waiting in the maid’s room, a
pistol on her lap, till the sound of the struggle brought her out,
just too late. Mr. Coldwell disappeared into the bedroom and returned
with the ugly and curious-shaped knife which the man had dropped.

“Eastern,” he said, as he felt the edge gingerly. “Malayan, I guess.”

He also had been sitting on a chair immediately to the right of the
wardrobe, but until he had made an examination later he had not known
from what place his assailant had come.

“I thought he’d come back through the window,” he mused. “That’s one
of the curiosities of human nature, Leslie; jot it down in your
notebook. We always look _under_ things for hidden criminals; we never
look over; and yet the cleverest fellow that ever got away from the
police was a steeplejack who hid for a fortnight at the top of a
smokestack! Ever wear garters, Leslie?”

She laughed softly.

“That almost sounds indelicate to me,” she said. “No, I won’t go very
deeply into the question, but I don’t wear garters!”

He was quite serious.

“Wish you would, just to oblige me. One garter, anyhow. I meant to
give it to you to-day.”

He drew something out of his pocket and she gasped.

“You really wish me to wear this?”

He nodded.

“A little heavy, but I wish you would,” he said.

He insisted upon staying the night, and to make doubly sure had a
policeman put on duty in the hall below. Early as the hour was when
she went out to her bath, she found him up and dressed, studying the
morning newspaper.

“Wonderful how you miss things when you’re away from the Yard for a
few hours,” he drawled.

She turned back from the open door of the bathroom. When Mr. Coldwell
drawled, there was something sensational to come.

“What have we missed?” she asked. It was not entirely curiosity which
made her ask.

He looked at the newspaper again and took off his glasses.

“Peter Dawlish was arrested last night.”

She gazed at him in horror and amazement.

“Arrested? On what charge?”

“Threatening to murder Princess Anita Bellini,” was the staggering
reply.




 CHAPTER XV.
 TRAPPED

Rarely did Mrs. Greta Gurden permit herself the luxury of brooding
upon her injuries. She was no philosopher, and it was sheer necessity
which made her disregard the irritations, petty and great, of life,
and concentrate her mind upon pleasant things. But she found herself
helpless with a leg that throbbed and throbbed, and the memory of
Anita Bellini’s insolence rankled as sorely. She was propped up in bed
with a heap of papers on her lap. Though there was no immediate need
for the work she had taken in hand, and, in truth, sought it only as a
relief from boredom, she permitted herself the illusion that she was
the victim of a task mistress who was not satisfied with her normal
and heavy exactions, but must needs add to her offence this torment of
a sick woman.

Old letters, old bills, a receipt or two, a few ancient telegrams
about nothing in particular, dozens of letters dealing earnestly with
forgotten accounts, an interminable correspondence between Anita and a
house agent--she turned the pages one by one, sorting the sheep from
the goats.

Presently she came to an old letter typewritten on plain paper--Anita,
like her dependent, had used a small portable typewriter for years.
The letter was unfinished; halfway through the princess had changed
her mind, or probably substituted another for this and had tossed the
rejected scrap aside to be gathered to the heap which had accumulated
and which was now being sorted.

She read the letter through as far as it went; she was sourly amused.
Anita must have been in a careless mood when she threw this away. The
old instinct of service told her that it ought to be destroyed at
once. She gripped the paper to tear it, thought better of her impulse,
and began to consider certain possibilities. To say that she felt
bitterly against Anita Bellini at that moment would be to grade her
emotion charitably. She was getting old, was she? She had lost her
looks and was unlikely to get a job in the chorus. Anita had taken it
for granted that she would be forever satisfied with the humiliating
position of companion. Capri was to be a kind of bonus.

The princess was a woman of temperament, sometimes feverishly elated,
sometimes savagely depressed. Yet in all her permutations of mood, she
had been consistently contemptuous of her hireling. Greta grew red and
hot and cold at the memory of the insults which this woman had heaped
upon her, and the hand that held the letter shook. And then an idea
began to take shape in her mind; it was half formed when she called
Mrs. Hobbs.

“Get my address book.”

She was a systematic woman, and entered without fail the location even
of chance acquaintances who might be of no value to her. She ran her
thumb down the index till it stopped at “D”; the last entry on the
crowded page was “Peter Dawlish.”

“Give me an envelope, please, and my fountain pen; and take this
letter to the post--no, bring my little typewriter.”

The obedient Mrs. Hobbs carried the tiny machine, which was a replica
of Anita’s, and laid it on the invalid’s lap. Greta inserted the
envelope, typed the address, and while the instrument was being
removed, inserted the torn sheet of paper and licked down the flap of
the envelope.

“Go to the general post office--you’d better take a bus each way--and
post this. If anybody asks you whether you’ve posted a letter for me,
you’re to say no.”

It was not the first time Mrs. Hobbs had received similar
instructions.

The houses in Severall Street are not equipped with letter boxes, and
postmen have learned by experience that inserting letters under doors
which are backed by coarse fibre mats is a difficult and sometimes an
impossible proposition.

Peter heard the heavy rat-tat of the postman and, going downstairs,
opened the door.

“Dawlish?” asked the postman.

“That is my name,” said Peter, in surprise. He took the letter and
closed the door. Had he followed the practice of Severall Street and
its people, which is never to go to the door without making a scrutiny
up and down the street, he could not have failed to see Leslie on her
way home.

His first thought was that it was a letter from her, but when he
brought it to the light of his room, he saw that it was typewritten
and had been posted in the city.

He opened the envelope and took out a sheet of typewriting paper. It
was discoloured, and one corner had been torn off. He looked at the
date and had a mild shock.

“July 7, 1916.”

And yet--as he saw--it had been posted that afternoon. There were just
three or four lines, the last of which stopped abruptly in the middle
of a sentence. Only dimly did he comprehend the significance of the
fragment.


 Dear Jane: Druze has found a very good home for your son in a
 middle-class family. There are no other children. He will be well
 cared for. And----


Scribbled below in pencil, and almost indecipherable, were the words:
“Martha’s servant.”

He must have read the letter a dozen times before he understood.

“Jane’s son--Jane’s little son!” He came to his feet slowly, his limbs
trembling, the paper swimming before his eyes.

Jane’s son--his son! The consciousness of fatherhood momentarily
overwhelmed him. Jane had had a child. He had never dreamed--somewhere
in the world was a little boy, fatherless--his little boy! He grew hot
at the thought. And then, in a frenzy of impatience, he took up his
coat, struggled into it, and, not stopping to extinguish the lamp, ran
down the stairs and out of the house.

The bus that carried him to Piccadilly seemed to crawl. He got down at
a traffic block at Bond Street, half walked, half ran into Berkeley
Street, and came at last to the dark portals of Lady Raytham’s house.
It was past ten. She might be out. But he would wait for her--all
night if necessary. He hated her at that moment and there was jealousy
behind the hate. He hated her for not telling him, for excluding him
from the knowledge and inspiration of their gift. Perhaps he was being
brought up as Raytham’s child, to call him “father.” Peter grew
insanely furious at the thought.

To the new butler who opened the door all callers were as yet strange.
Peter seemed no stranger than others and he was met civilly.

“What name shall I tell her ladyship?” he asked.

“Mr. Peter,” said Peter, after thought.

He was shown into the small drawing room, and paced up and down like a
caged animal until he heard the door open and, turning, met face to
face, for the first time in eight years, the woman of “the adventure.”

She was pale but very calm and sure of herself as she closed the door
behind her. For a while they stood, looking at each other. She had
matured, grown more beautiful; the old, graceful carriage was
unchanged; the enticing lines of her had come to a greater perfection.
He had grown older, she thought, was much more of a man than when she
had known him before. His face had formed; he had resolution and
strength and a balance that had been missing; in his eyes she read
something that chilled her.

“You wish to see me, Peter?” she asked.

He nodded.

He was trembling; feared to speak lest his voice betray him.

“What is it you wish to see me about?”

“I want my child.” His voice was low; the words seemed to choke him,
so that he ended on a cough.

“You want--your child?”

She shook her head so slightly that if he had not been watching her
closely the gesture would have escaped him.

“Will you tell me what you mean?”

She was fencing. She wanted time to take all this in. He had shocked
her very badly.

“Why pretend, Jane? You know what I want, and what I mean. Where is
our child?”

She passed her hand wearily across her eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said. She made no attempt to evade the question,
accepted his knowledge, startling as it was, “I don’t know. Is it
worth while knowing? He is very happy. I did what was best, Peter. I
told nobody. When I went to Reno----”

“You have divorced me?”

She did not answer. A lie trembled on her lips and was instantly
rejected--impatiently.

“No, I have not divorced you,” she said. “They would not grant me a
divorce because you had not been served with the papers--or something
of the sort. I don’t understand the law very well. I was a fool, of
course.”

Another intense silence.

“That puts me in your hands, doesn’t it?” she went on. “Though I don’t
imagine you will----”

He stopped her with an impatient gesture.

“I’m not thinking of you and I’m not thinking of myself,” he said. “I
am thinking of the boy. You don’t know? Jane, you horrify me! You
don’t know where your own child---- Good heavens! I thought he might
not be here, but that you should tell me so quietly and calmly that
you’ve lost track of him--as if he were a----”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know. Honestly, Peter, I don’t know. I was terrified when I
knew he was coming. I just dimly remember seeing the little thing, and
then they took him away--we had arranged it beforehand.”

“Who are ‘we?’”

She hesitated.

“Anita was very good to me, and so was Druze. It was only then I
discovered that Druze was a woman. I had to pay for it
afterward--Druze’s knowledge, I mean. I don’t really remember the
child--only just that vague, queer impression like the elusive memory
of a dream. Peter, be a little pitiful. I was in a terrible condition;
my father was writing, asking me to make up my mind about Raytham. You
knew he wanted to marry me? Raytham had lent Father a lot of money,
and I was afraid, terribly afraid, of what would happen if Father came
to learn--about the marriage and everything.

“He knew I’d been to America, of course; I was supposed to have taken
an engagement to sing--you remember that, don’t you, Peter? But he
didn’t know I’d returned, or what had become of me. I had to send all
my letters to a friend in New York to be posted back to him.”

She stopped.

“Where is the child? That is all I want to know.”

She shook her head.

“Druze knew. She told me something just before she went out; she had
been drinking, Peter. She told me a ghastly thing.” Her voice broke.
“Terrible, terrible!” She covered her eyes again, and he waited, his
heart a heavy stone.

“This ghastly thing; what was it?” he asked at last.

“She said”--this needed courage to think, it was a torture to
say--“that even she didn’t know where the child was; that she had
handed the boy to the first person who, for a consideration, offered
to adopt it; and all the time I had been comforting myself with the
thought that--that he at least was being brought up happily, however
much a blackguard his foster father was.”

“What do you mean?” he demanded.

“I’ve been paying money, big sums of money,” she said at last, “as I
supposed to the man who had adopted him, and who, learning of my
marriage to Raytham, had for years blackmailed me. Too late I
discovered that this blackmailer was mythical, that it was Druze who
was robbing me all the time.”

Peter drew a deep breath.

“How awful! How perfectly awful!” he whispered. “Just disappeared into
the mass--and you allowed him to go. I can’t understand that. I
thought that women----”

She stopped him with a weary gesture.

“I don’t understand women, either. I wish I’d kept him and had faced
all the trouble that would have followed. You know about it for the
first time, Peter, and you have the support of your righteousness. It
has been a bad dream to me--an eight-year long discomfort. And now it
is a nightmare.” She pressed her throbbing temples. “I can’t sleep for
thinking of him. That little mite of a boy--my boy and yours--perhaps
being starved, or dead perhaps, or suffering----”

She screwed her eyes tight as though to shut out a horrible vision.

“Does Bellini know?” He was like ice now.

“Anita?” She looked at him in surprise. “No; why should she? You hate
Anita, of course. I’m not really--fond of her. She’s difficult. But
she was very helpful to me, Peter.”

He looked at her steadily.

“Who was Martha?”

He saw by her frown that she did not understand him.

“Do you know a woman called Martha?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t remember anybody of that name. Why?”

“Martha’s servant had the child. Bellini knows. And what Bellini
knows, I will know.”

He made as though to leave the room, but she barred the way.

“Peter, will you forgive me? I’ve been a fool--a wicked fool, Peter.
I’d gladly change places with my own kitchen maid to undo all the
past. You loathe me, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t loathe you,” he said quietly. “I’m awfully sorry for you
in a way; but I’m disappointed in you, too, Jane. You’ve been a
weakling.”

“Have I? I suppose I have.” She saw him, a blurred figure, through a
mist of tears. “I suppose I have. And one pays dearer for weakness
than for wickedness, I think. Where are you going?”

“I’m going to find the child.”

She threw out her arms in a gesture of despair.

“Find the child! If you only could! Peter, if you could bring him to
me and----”

“You!” He laughed harshly. “The child belongs to me! To me! Do you
hear? You had him and lost him. If I find him I will keep him.”

He brushed past her, threw open the door, and stalked through the hall
into the night.

He had still the greater part of the twenty pounds left that Leslie
had given to him, and at this moment of crisis he must spend; he could
not afford to economize. A taxi driver accepted with some reluctance
his order to drive to Wimbledon Common. It was a long journey, and he
had time to put in order the confusion of his mind.

Anita Bellini knew; he was confident of that. And if she knew, he
should know. Her residence was a mansion, standing in two acres of
ground on the fashionable side of Wimbledon Common; a big, somewhat
old-fashioned house, garnished with the square towers and big Gothic
turrets which were the joy of the Victorian architects. It had
something of a mediæval appearance, seemed to be a veritable castle
of despair when he ordered the cab to wait. The cautious man demanded
something on account, and wisely, as it proved.

He strode up the gravelled drive. No light showed in any window; even
the transom above the massive front door was lifeless. He pulled the
bell and the faint clang of it came back to him. After a long time he
heard the rattle of chains, the shooting back of a bolt, and a faint
light was reflected behind the fanlight. The door was opened a few
inches by a very old man with dirty white hair and wearing the
slovenly uniform of a footman. Peter saw that the longer chain was
still fastened to the door and that the aperture was not big enough to
squeeze through.

“You’re Simms, aren’t you?” He remembered the ancient. “I want to see
the princess.”

The old man made the grimace that Peter remembered.

“You can’t see the princess; she’s not at home,” he said in a loud
cracked voice.

“Tell her Peter Dawlish wishes to see her, and if she will not let me
in she can come to the door,” he said.

He was not prepared to have the door slammed in his face, yet that was
what happened. He waited for five minutes, and then he heard the lock
turn. This time he saw Anita. She wore a long green dress, smothered
as usual with beading which glittered in the dim hall light.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want to speak to you privately.”

“This is as private an interview as you’ll get,” she said coolly.

The reflection of the hall light on her monocle produced an eerie
illusion. It was as though she were glaring at him with one malignant
golden eye.

“What do you want?” she repeated. “If it’s money, you can’t have it.
This is not a charitable institution or a home for convicts.”

In the pause that followed he made a mental calculation as to the
strength of the chain that held him from admission. He might at a
pinch break it and force an entrance. He was prepared to go to any mad
lengths to get the information he sought.

“Where is my child?” he asked.

Not a muscle of the big face moved.

“I didn’t know you’d been raising a family. Surely I’m the last person
in the world to be acquainted with your vicarious progeny.”

“Where is Jane’s child? Perhaps you’ll understand that.”

She had been taken aback by the first question, he was sure. The
length of time that elapsed before she answered betrayed her.

“So you know that, do you? The child? I’m afraid I can’t tell you. I
have something better to do than to keep track of the indiscretions of
my friends, and certainly I do not concern myself with the
illegitimate children of convicted forgers----”

“You lie,” said Peter quietly. “You know I was married to Jane.”

Anita Bellini chuckled.

“The marriage was illegal; didn’t you know that? You didn’t comply
with certain formalities----”

“I have seen Jane to-night. She has no doubt about its legality. Where
is my son?”

“Where you will never find him.” All the pent-up malignity of the
woman suddenly took expression. Her face, never attractive, was
contorted by rage to an appearance that was almost ludicrous. “Where
you will never find him! In the slime and the mud where his father
belongs; dead, I hope!”

A sudden insane fury possessed him. He was scarcely human; saw the
hateful face of this woman through a redness, and flung himself
against the door. It jerked back with a crash and suddenly flew open.
The chain had broken.

To him she was no longer a woman, but some devil that had taken human
shape. He wanted to kill her, to grip that big throat and choke the
life out of her. As the chain broke, she stepped back, and he found
himself looking into the black muzzle of a pistol.

“Don’t move,” she said gratingly. “Don’t move, Peter Dawlish. I am
justified in shooting you in the defense of my life.”

She did not see his hand move. The pistol was struck down from her
grip and fell with a clatter on the floor; and, in his mad anger, with
murder in his heart, his hand was outflung. Then somebody called him.

“Peter!”

At the sound of the voice his arm dropped, paralyzed with amazement. A
woman was in the hall; she had come out of a room at the foot of the
broad stairway; a woman in black silk, white-haired, hard-faced; it
was his mother!

“Come in here.”

She pointed to the open door of the room and he walked past her
without another glance at Anita Bellini. She was shrinking back
against the wall, frightened for the first time in her life.

It was a small study furnished in the Oriental fashion; there was a
great silken divan, and a shaded lantern hung from the ceiling.
Something more modern he saw--a telephone on the tiny octagonal table.
The receiver was off--he had interrupted her in the act of
telephoning.

“What is the meaning of this?”

Mrs. Dawlish had assumed the old air that he knew so well and detested
so much.

He was still shaking, but he was calmer.

“I presume you don’t need to be told; you must have heard. I came to
your friend----”

“To the Princess Bellini,” interrupted the woman. “Yes?”

“To discover where was my child.”

“Really?” The gray eyebrows rose. “I was not aware that I was a
grandmother.”

The old devil rose again in him.

“Then your hearing is affected,” he said harshly. “You know--of course
you know! The whole gang of you know! You know about Jane, you know
about my marriage, you know about the child. Perhaps you know where he
is.”

And then, to add to the fire of his fury, he saw her smile.

“You have always been a fool, Peter. I suppose you will be a fool to
the end of your days,” she said. “You had better go back to your
envelope addressing and forget there are such things in the world as
children. I have been trying very hard to do the same for the past
seven years.”

She was a surprising woman, for without warning she came back to the
offer she had made to him.

“You would be well advised to go to Canada or Australia, or any other
place that takes your fancy,” she said, and went on in a
conversational tone to discuss the advantages which might accrue.

He was puzzled. Then it occurred to him that she was talking to gain
time--for what? His back had been to the door and now he edged round
until it was under his view. But if Anita Bellini contemplated any
treachery, there was no visible or audible evidence.

He heard the front-door bell ring, and an exchange of voices in the
hall, and then the door opened and two men entered. It was not
necessary that he should be very experienced in such matters to
realize that they were detectives. His mother’s narrative stopped
automatically. Her white, skinny finger pointed to him.

“This man is Peter Dawlish--an ex-convict!” she said. “I charge him
with threatening to murder my friend Princess Anita Bellini.”

A quarter of an hour after, the taxicab which Peter had employed to
bring him to Wimbledon deposited him at the police station, and he was
sitting, dazed and wrathful, behind the locked door of a police cell.




 CHAPTER XVI.
 AN OLD RECORD

“I can’t believe it.” Leslie stared at the inspector. “His own
mother charged him? How monstrous!”

Mr. Coldwell had reached an age where it was almost impossible to
surprise him.

“Queer, isn’t it? But, Lord bless you, mothers do rum things! I’ve
known cases--but you’ve heard about ’em, too, Leslie. Peter went down
to Wimbledon to raise the devil for some reason or other. It appears
his mother had heard the fuss he was making at the door and telephoned
for the police before he broke in. It might have been bad for him if
he were a convict on license, but fortunately he’s time-expired, and
he has only to say that it was a family quarrel to get bound over. I
don’t think he will be called upon for defense, anyway.”

Leslie Maughan nibbled at the end of her glove, a devastating habit of
hers in moments of perturbation.

“I really can’t believe it, though of course it must have happened.
What was his mother doing down there? And why on earth did Peter do
such a mad thing?”

Coldwell smiled.

“Go down and ask him,” he said. “I’ll give you a note to the
inspector, and you might have a few minutes’ talk with him before he
appears in court. It is very unlikely that they will remand him to
Brixton. If the princess has got horse sense she will get him
acquitted. Mrs. Dawlish is pretty sick and sorry that she allowed
herself to charge him. I can tell you that because, as soon as I heard
about the case, I phoned up the station and the sergeant in charge
told me that Mrs. Dawlish came to the police station at seven o’clock
this morning to see if she could get her name taken out of the record.
She’d allowed her spite to lead her astray, and she knows that when it
comes into court, the story of a mother charging her son is going to
make a pretty big newspaper sensation. That is why I think that the
charge may be withdrawn.”

When Leslie reached the police station she found that Peter had been
transferred to the cells adjoining the court, and her own card was
sufficient to obtain an interview. He met her with a rueful smile.

“You see me again in my natural environment,” he said cheerfully.

“Why did you go to Bellini’s?”

“I wanted to learn something,” he said, and he would not explain any
more.

She told him of the inspector’s prophecy, but he seemed careless as to
whether the charge would be supported.

“It was certainly a facer,” he said. “I didn’t expect my mother to
take that line. I suppose until then I had not realized how bitterly
she hated me. They may go on with the charge, knowing that in any
circumstances I should not tell what brought me to Wimbledon.”

She did not press him for any further particulars. The interview took
place in the passage adjoining the court; policemen and prisoners were
passing every few seconds, and the conditions were not favourable to
confidences. She told him of her own alarming experience, and when she
had finished he whistled.

“That explains everything--the chain on the door and old Simms being
on guard. I never saw the old devil again after I broke in.”

She made no attempt to hide her astonishment.

“I don’t see why a chain on Anita Bellini’s door explains a little
yellow man in my room,” she said.

“It does--most emphatically.”

Just then his name was called by the court usher and she followed him
into court. Peter had hardly been put in the steel pen when the
detective sergeant who had arrested him stood up, and addressed the
bench.

“This case, your Worship, arose from a visit which the prisoner paid
to the house of the Princess Anita Bellini last night. The prisoner,
who is a very distant relative of the princess’s, had some sort of
grievance, and the argument became so heated that Her Highness was
compelled to telephone for the police. The princess has no wish to
prosecute the prisoner in the circumstances, or to bring a family
quarrel into court, and in these circumstances I don’t propose to
produce any evidence, your worship.”

“But the charge is attempted murder,” said the presiding magistrate.

“The charge was only taken last night,” explained the detective, “and
it was the intention of the police to ask for a remand. But the
princess has modified her statement, and I am advised that a
conviction could not follow on the evidence that she would offer. In
those circumstances I ask your worship to discharge Dawlish.”

The magistrate nodded, and that was the end of the proceedings. Peter
walked out of the dock and joined the girl in front of the police
court.

At first he refused her invitation to drive him back to town.

“You’re coming with me,” she said firmly. “I have a lot of things to
say to you and a list of questions as long as Lucretia’s grocery
order. Probably you will not answer them, but that is beside the
point.”

They were crossing Putney Common when she leaned over and spoke to the
driver, and, slowing down, he brought the car to the edge of the path.

“Let us go for a little walk,” she said, and no sooner were they out
of earshot than she asked: “Why did you go to Princess Bellini’s last
night, Peter Dawlish?”

“To find out something.”

“What did you want to know?”

Should he tell her? He could not understand himself. Why should he
hesitate to take her into his confidence, she who knew so much? And
yet he felt an unaccountable shyness. It was as though the confession
would make a perceptible difference in their curious friendship. At
last he blurted out the truth.

“Jane had a child,” he said.

She stopped, and her deep violet eyes met his.

“_Your_ child--well?”

He was astonished by the coolness with which she received this
momentous news.

“Did you guess?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I knew,” she answered quietly. “It was born at a little farm called
Appledore, near Carlisle.”

He was momentarily paralyzed.

“You knew--all the time?” he stammered.

“I knew all the time,” she repeated. “I knew you had a child, before I
knew you were married. It was at Appledore that I found the book of
poems, and your little blank verse. And that was why I wasn’t quite
sure you were married. Naturally she would call herself Mrs. Dawlish
in the circumstances.”

They were passing a park bench and she caught his arm and drew him
down.

“I’ll tell you all about it, shall I?” And when she added: “I was
spending a holiday in Cumberland, and I suppose it was fate that led
me to this very farmhouse. The old lady, Mrs. Still, who owned the
place was a widow, and rather a garrulous old soul, but very kind. It
was only natural she should tell me of the interesting people who had
stayed with her. One of the most interesting was a pretty girl, whose
baby was born in the very room I occupied. She came in February,
before the season had started--there is a season in Cumberland, you
know--and stayed till the beginning of April. She called herself--it
doesn’t matter what she called herself--but it was not Jane Dawlish.
The child was born on the seventeenth of March--St. Patrick’s Day. The
old lady, who was half Irish, remembered that fact because she had
sent a bunch of shamrock up to the pretty lady the morning the child
was born.”

“Who was with her?” asked Peter huskily.

“Two women--a nurse, and somebody who was obviously Anita Bellini. No
doctor was called in; apparently the other woman was a maternity
nurse, and it was not necessary to call for medical assistance. My old
Appledore lady never saw the baby; she wasn’t even sure when it was
taken away, but she thought it was on the second day following the
birth, because that was the day a man came from London. The ‘man’ was
obviously Druze. She arrived just before Mrs. Still went into Carlisle
to do her midweek shopping, and when she returned Druze had gone. The
old lady did not know that the baby had gone, too, until the end of
the week, when she asked to be allowed to see it and was told that it
had been sent off to a warmer climate. The only thing she knew was
that it was a boy; the nurse had told her that, and the Appledore lady
was rather disappointed because, as she said, the pretty lady had been
praying and hoping for a girl.

“Why she should pray or hope for a baby of either sex is a little
beyond me, but I have no reason to doubt the truth of the old lady’s
statement. She showed me very proudly a little book that the ‘pretty
young thing’ was in the habit of reading, a book of poems; and then I
saw your ridiculous acrostic. Just about this time I was rather
intrigued by certain things which had happened to Lady Raytham. We
had, in fact, information at Scotland Yard that she was paying
blackmail, and I naturally connected the two events: her appearance
here under an assumed name, the birth of the child, and the fact that
she was paying out large sums of money from time to time for some
unknown service. When, about an hour before I left the farm, old Mrs.
Still said that she had heard one of the women speak about ‘Peter,’ I
was pretty sure that I was on the right track.”

“Do you know the name of the nurse? Was it Martha----”

“Martha!” She sprang up and stared at him. “Martha? What do you know
about Martha?”

He was a little dumfounded by the effect of his words.

“Tell me--tell me quickly,” she said impatiently, and he produced from
his pocket the letter he had received, and which had brought him to
Jane Raytham.

She looked at the pencilled words.

“Martha’s servant. That was Druze’s sister,” she said suddenly. “She
had the child. Peter, I am going on this new trail, and you mustn’t
interfere until I’ve followed this thing to the end.”

“What do you think of me, I wonder?” he asked.

She eyed him steadily.

“What should I think of you? You’re unfortunate, Peter Dawlish. I’ve
told you that before.”

He shook his head with a wry smile.

“You don’t know how fortunate I am,” he said, and she laughed in spite
of herself.

“Come back to the car, or we’ll find ourselves indulging in an orgy of
mutual self-pity.”

It did not occur to Peter that he should ask her why the self-pity
should be mutual, but he never forgot her words.

She dropped him in the centre of London and, going on to Scotland
Yard, interviewed her chief and received permission from him to take a
day off. Her first step was to get into telephonic communication with
the chief detective of Plymouth, who promised to call her up as soon
as his inquiries were completed. Though she was on a holiday, there
were many official interruptions.

First there came the man who had arrested Mrs. Inglethorne to tell her
that that unrepentant lady had been remanded, and to expose the
red-faced woman’s shocking history. Her maiden name had been Zamosser.
She was of Dutch origin, though her parents had lived for many years
in England; and with the exception of a very short interval she had
been either in the hands or under the observation of the police. She
was a receiver, and worse; had been convicted of shoplifting, and,
except for one interval in her early youth when she seemed to have
lived so respectable a life that the police had no trace of her, she
had been in and out of prison since she was a child.

“What about the children?” asked Leslie, anticipating the reply.

The sergeant laughed.

“One of them’s hers; the others are what she calls ‘adopted.’ That is
to say, they have been inconvenient children of whom she has taken
charge for a small weekly sum or for a larger payment cash down. The
only one we have been able to trace is a little boy.”

For a moment wild hopes had surged up into Leslie’s heart, but they
were to die at his words.

“Oh, you’ve traced the boy?” she said. She remembered the wizened
little fellow who had looked up at her with big, sleepy eyes when she
had made her incursion to the kitchen.

“Well, we’ve found his mother, at any rate. The other children mostly
belong to poor little working-class girls.”

“Are there many baby farmers in England?”

“Thousands,” said the officer, and her heart sank. “They’re supposed
to be under police supervision, but of course they’re not. There is no
law to prevent anybody adopting a child, though the actual adoption is
not recognized in law.”

“There is no list of them?”

He shook his head.

“There may be a few hundred on the books. You would know that better
yourself, Miss Maughan, as you’re at the Yard.”

And then, unconsciously extinguishing her last lingering hope:

“I was once asked to trace a little baby that had been handed over to
a ‘farmer,’ but it is like looking for a needle in a haystack, trying
to find an ‘adopted child’ after trace has been lost of it,” he said.
“A few of them drift into the workhouse schools; most of them die. It
doesn’t pay the kind of woman who makes a living out of that sort of
thing to feed them properly. There should be a State institution where
unwanted children could be taken and cared for and become an asset to
the country.”

He had been gone half an hour when the Plymouth call came through and
the news was not especially helpful. Martha Druze had qualified as a
maternity nurse in the years ’89-’90, and had left the hospital to
take up a private position as a general nurse. It was believed she had
gone abroad, but there was no actual evidence of this fact except that
the present matron, who remembered her, had received a postal card
mailed at Port Said a month or two after Martha had gone away. There
was also a rumour that she had married very well, to somebody who was
variously described as a carpenter of Cape Town and a rancher in
Australia. There was only one clue which was faintly promising. Martha
was known to have registered herself in the books of a London agency,
the name of which Leslie jotted down.

As soon as the conversation was through, she searched the telephone
directory for the nurses’ agency. It was not there; possibly it had
been overwhelmed by competition and had died, as so many other
agencies die, from sheer inanition. To make absolutely sure on this
point she called up one well-known woman agent and asked her a
question.

“Ashley’s Agency? Oh, yes. It is now called the Central Nurses’
Bureau--in fact, we are Ashley’s Agency, though we never use that
title!”

Leslie explained who she was and what she required.

“If you’ll come round, we will show you the old books; we still have
them,” was the encouraging reply.

Leslie Maughan put on her hat and coat and went out at once. Halfway
down she remembered Mr. Coldwell’s gift and went back to buckle on a
most uncomfortable garter. The premises of the agency were off Regent
Street, no great distance to walk, and she was there in five minutes.

The secretary, who had replied to her telephone message, was already
selecting the books for her inspection, and by great good fortune the
first of these she had discovered contained the very information that
the girl had asked for.

“Yes, we have her on our books--Martha Druze. She applied to us before
she left Plymouth Hospital apparently, for that is her original
address, and we placed her in a situation in the early part of 1891.”

The secretary had opened the book and her finger pointed to a line.
Leslie read; she found herself gripping tight to the edge of the
table. Looking at her, the secretary saw that her eyes were blazing
and wondered what there was in this simple record to engender such
excitement.

“It was the only job we ever got for her----” she began.

Leslie shook her head.

“She would not want another,” she said.




 CHAPTER XVII.
 THE TELLTALE PERFUME

When Lady Raytham had begun a letter to her husband the district
messenger arrived with Leslie’s note. His lordship, in his aimless
way, had gone on to Bombay, and was suffering from an old trouble of
his; had written a very long letter describing minutely his many
symptoms, and had expressed--this was unexpected--the desire that she
should go out to him.

She read Leslie’s note:


 Dear Jane: Won’t you come round and see me? I’ve got the whole day
 off, and there is a tremendous lot that I want to talk to you about,
 not as a poor apology for a policewoman, but as a very human girl who
 would love to smooth over some of the rough road you are treading.
 Lucretia has orders to say that I’m out and to admit nobody. I can
 give you a home-made lunch, and can promise that you will suffer no
 ill effects therefrom. Or we can lunch regally at or near the Carlton.
 Please come.


Jane scribbled a note which was delivered to the waiting messenger,
locked away her half-finished letter in the bureau, and went up into
her room to change. Lucretia had no sooner ushered Jane in to Leslie
when she burst out talking.

“Did you see Peter? What happened? I’m so worried about it. I nearly
called you up this morning.”

“I shouldn’t have known,” said Leslie. “At least, I should have known
he’d been arrested----”

“Arrested?”

This was obviously news to Jane Raytham, for her face went white.
Leslie explained what had happened.

“How could she? How could she?” demanded Jane Raytham vehemently. “It
was wicked! But how like her! Poor Peter! He lives everlastingly in
rough seas.”

And then the note of anger in her voice turned to one of anxiety.

“Did Anita tell him anything?”

“Not what he wanted to know,” replied Leslie.

The visitor was quick to understand the meaning of that reply.

“Do you know why he went?”

“He went to find his child.”

The beautiful face of Jane Raytham flushed a delicate pink, and paled
again.

“My child,” she said, in a low voice. “I suppose you despise me, don’t
you?”

Leslie shook her head.

“No, why should I? If I despised every woman who had a baby----”

“I don’t mean that. But I allowed them to take it away. I didn’t want
to, Leslie. Will you believe that? I wanted to keep the child with me.
I fought hard for him. The compromise was a desperately weak one, but
at least I gained that point.”

“What was the compromise?”

Lady Raytham smiled faintly.

“If you didn’t despise me before, you’ll despise me now,” she said.

She was at the fireplace in her old attitude: arm along the mantel,
forehead resting on the back of her hand, her eyes fixed on the fire.

“They agreed to that. If it was a girl I should keep her; if it was a
boy, he should go away. A mad, wicked idea, so grossly unfair to the
child! But I’m terribly tender toward girls. I can’t see a girl suffer
without experiencing a shrivelled-up feeling inside. I wonder if you
know what my girlhood was. If it had been a girl I should have kept
her with me and braved everything. But it was a boy--a wonderful
boy--they told me of it afterward. I wish I’d seen him, known him, if
only for a day, but then I should never, never have allowed him to
go.”

She turned her face away and her shoulders shook. Leslie sat at the
desk and drew fantastic, meaningless arabesques upon her blotting pad;
and when that storm of sobbing had died down she said:

“I suppose it is absurd to ask you if there is any clue by which the
child could be traced? Of course you’ve explored every avenue. You’ve
discovered nothing?”

Jane was manipulating her handkerchief, her back toward her, and there
was finality in the shake of her head.

“No. I’ve already tried. I didn’t tell Anita, but for months I’ve had
detectives searching. I thought he was in a happy home, you know; I
never dreamed that he’d been left.”

She could not go on. It was quite a long time before she mastered her
emotion.

“Druze told me that night--that horrible night she went away. Laughed
in my face when I asked her where the child was. That is why I went
after her. I guessed that she had gone to Anita’s, and when I found
her dead on the path I was frantic. I thought she must have some
hidden paper that would tell me. But when I searched, there was
nothing--nothing!”

Jane Raytham turned her face away from the girl.

“I have no justification--none,” she said. “I was just wickedly
selfish. Even if he’d been illegitimate I could not be excused.
Illegitimate!” She smiled bitterly. “Thank God I’ve had no children
since I married Raytham! He was not keen about children, or about me
for the matter of that. Our married life has been a sort of--modified
celibacy!”

She took down a photograph from a mantelshelf and looked at it.

“This is Mr. Coldwell, isn’t it?”

Leslie nodded.

“It would be a great feather in his cap if he--arrested me for
bigamy.”

“Mr. Coldwell is not frantically keen on feathers of that kind, Jane,”
said the girl loyally.

Jane put down the photograph and dropped into the nearest armchair,
curling her legs up under her.

“I’m a beast! I’m putting the worst construction on everything; taking
the most uncharitable view of everybody.”

She smiled pitifully, reached out her hand for her bag that lay on the
table, and snapped open a diamond-encrusted cigarette case.

“I tried drugging once,” she said; “a white powder you sniff up your
nose. For some reason it made me deathly sick, and I didn’t pursue the
practice. But I envy people who can find relief and forgetfulness.”

“Another good way,” said Leslie brutally, “is to put your head on a
railway track when a large, fat freight train is due! You’d accomplish
the same result, and give much less trouble to other people. And
presently, when your boy emerges from the mist, as he will, he would
come to a mother who was hardly worth finding.”

Jane was laughing quietly.

“You’re a weird girl. How old are you?”

Leslie told her.

“I wish Peter was in love with you. He must find happiness somewhere
or other.”

“Do I come into this?” asked Leslie dryly. “Or are Peter and you the
only two people in the world whose feelings count?”

She stopped Jane’s penitence with a laughing gesture.

“I’ll tell you something, Jane. I’m rather in love with Peter; do you
feel faint?”

“I’m not a little bit faint.” But Jane was more than a little bit
curious. “You’re not jesting?”

“I decided this morning that I was very much in love with him,” said
Leslie calmly, “but I’ve thought a long time about it, and have
reached the conclusion that it is rather my maternal instinct that is
operating. I’m loving him in a motherly fashion, in fact. Sooner or
later that boy of yours is going to be found, and then you’ve got to
go to your husband and tell him the truth.”

She was watching Jane’s face closely, ready to note and spring upon
the first visible sign of repugnance. But Jane was listening; and
listening, the girl realized her heart sinking with approval.

“And then Lord Raytham must give you up, and Peter and you must start
afresh.”

Here was the first note of dissent. Jane shook her head.

“Peter is different,” she said. “I realized it when I saw him last
night. He’s not the same man. And can you wonder? Leslie, I never
loved him. You’ll think that’s a horrible thing to say of the father
of my child. He represented--I don’t know, curiosity, I
suppose--adventure--the grand hairpin turn of life, where so much is
upset and smashed, so many hopes and ideals die. And he never loved
me. He was infatuated and he was fond of me, and had a wonderful
chivalrous feeling that he was rescuing me from something. That is
half his trouble now, that he knows he didn’t love me, and it makes
him feel ugly and ashamed. You think the child may bring us together.
I’m becoming quite a thought reader! But that sort of thing really
doesn’t happen, does it? Children really do not determine very much.
Half the women who are divorced have children who love them and whom
they love, but it didn’t prevent--things happening. I think Peter and
I might be good friends, and the boy might love us both, even though
we were apart, for children give you back what you give to them. I
could give him such a lot.”

With an impatient shake of her head she sat up and walked resolutely
to the window.

“Let us talk of rabbits,” she said. “How did you break this?” she
asked.

For a new and unpainted sash had been put into the window space that
morning.

“Never mind about that. A visitor put his head through it. Jane,
you’re taking rather a hopeless view of life, aren’t you?”

The woman shrugged.

“My dear, what can happen? If this were a story and it wasn’t real
life, I should go away somewhere, contract a malignant fever and die
to soft, slow music! But I refuse to offer myself up as a sacrifice in
order that my story shall have a smooth and a happy ending! And if I
die, Peter will endow me with all sorts of gentle qualities which I
don’t possess, and will pass the rest of his life in the twilight of
melancholy. I know men!”

Leslie was laughing softly. She had too keen a sense of humour not to
appreciate the fact that this entanglement had its funny side.
Suddenly she became serious.

“There are only a few questions I want to ask you, that I’ve never
asked before. Did you give Druze your emerald necklace?”

Jane nodded.

“Yes. This mythical person wanted thirty thousand pounds. I could only
draw twenty without Raytham knowing. The necklace was worth twelve
thousand, and I suggested that Druze should sell it. She jumped at the
chance. I thought she had taken it away a week before she actually
did.”

“You can’t account for the pendant being found in her hand?”

Jane shook her head.

“And you don’t know where the rest of the chain is to be found?”

“I am absolutely ignorant. I can’t conceive how she met her death. It
is only reasonable to suppose that she had a life and friends of whom
I knew nothing. Where she went, after she left my house, I do not
know. I guessed she was going to Anita’s because she would not leave
England without saying good-bye: she was very much attached to Anita.”

“How long after your baby was born were you married to Lord Raytham?”

Jane considered.

“About ten months,” she said.

“Did you go to Reno personally?”

“Yes,” Jane said. “That was one of the queer coincidences of it all.
My father had a small farm near Reno, just a shack and a few acres of
ground, and this was accepted as a residential qualification. Of
course, I had to lie desperately and say I was living there all the
time, and really I believed the divorce would go through. I even
appeared in court and gave my evidence, and I thought that the thing
was settled, until Anita saw me outside the court-house and told me
that my lawyers had made a bungle and that the divorce could not be
granted without serving some papers upon Peter. I went straight away
with her; her automobile was waiting, for I was scared of the
reporters, who were all the time hunting marriage romances for their
newspapers. Besides, the baby was coming. I was frightened that people
would know.”

“And you returned immediately?”

Jane nodded.

“Yes; I went to Cumberland from Liverpool. Anita discovered the place.
It was some time after Christmas; I remember that I was in New York on
Christmas Day.”

“There is one final question, Jane, and then I’ll stop being a mark of
interrogation and take you out to lunch. That is, if you don’t mind
being seen in public with a Scotland Yard female?”

“If you wish,” said Jane, with the first spark of animation she had
shown, “I will eat my lunch out of a paper bag with you, seated on top
of one of Landseer’s lions!”

“This is the question,” said Leslie, slowly and deliberately.
“Marriage with Lord Raytham was in the air, wasn’t it, and you had
discussed it with Anita?”

Jane nodded.

“And did she know of your intention of marrying Raytham whether the
divorce was granted or not? Please think very carefully before you
answer.”

“There’s no need to think very carefully. I told Anita that I should
marry Raytham whether the divorce was granted or not. I salved my
conscience by expressing doubt as to the validity of the marriage.”

Leslie leaned back in her chair with a large and happy smile.

“You’re a wicked conspirator, a perfectly horrible mother, and not a
tremendous success in any of your matrimonial ventures!” She slipped
her arm round the woman’s waist and kissed her on the cheek. “But
you’re rather a darling. We’ll lunch at the Pall Mall, which is
terribly nice for women, and we’ll occupy the afternoon with a movie.
I love the movies--especially the romantic ones!”

She was rather relieved than otherwise when, nearing the end of
luncheon, Jane remembered, with some contrition, that she had promised
to be at home that afternoon to receive a committee of which she was
chairman.

“Child welfare,” she said laconically. “The angels weep every time I
sit at the head of that board and dilate upon the duty of mothers!
Raytham, in spite of queer little ways, is a dear where these
societies are concerned, and he’s fearfully in earnest about them. I
drew the line when he wanted me to take control of a committee which
helps fallen women. That was stretching my sense of humour to a
breaking point.”

They parted in the Haymarket, and Leslie went back to her flat,
stopping on her way to wire to Peter. He came when the day was fading
and Lucretia was drawing the curtains. Two stout suitcases were ready
packed in the hall, and during the afternoon Coldwell had called her
up with strict injunction to be ready for him when he came.

“I’m not going to allow you to stay in the flat until this little
business is finished,” he said.

Here he had a strong supporter in Lucretia Brown.

“Not for a million pounds would I stay in this place after dark,
miss,” she said. “What with burglars and people jumping out of the
window and what not, I wonder I’ve got any hair left! When I combed it
this morning it came out in handfuls.”

“The remedy for that is shingling,” suggested Leslie, and Lucretia
grew sardonic.

“When I want to look like a boy I’ll wear trousers, miss!” she said.
“Not that I’ve anything to say against shingling, which suits you very
well, because you’ve got the kind of head. And as for these bingles
with your ears sticking out all over the place like the Princess
Bellorino or whatever her name is--I call that disgusting! The only
use for ears is to hear with, not to go pushing theirselves out into
the world, so to speak. I was hoping her ladyship was coming back this
afternoon, miss. A bit of society does nobody any harm.”

“If she’d only known, I’m sure she’d have jumped at the opportunity of
giving us a social lift,” said Leslie, and Lucretia sniffed. She was
not very thin-skinned, but she always knew when her young lady was
indulging in what Lucretia described as “sarc.”

“I only want to say----” she began.

“There’s the bell,” interrupted Leslie. “If it is Mr. Dawlish, shoot
him up.”

“A low convict!” murmured Lucretia, but she murmured it under her
breath.

The convict was neither lowly nor humble. Leslie had never seen him
look more serious, and the old flippancy of his tone was gone. It was
a very determined young man who sat down at the opposite side of her
writing table.

He had been making inquiries, he said.

“It is a hopeless business when you don’t know where to start. I
thought Jane would give me a hint, but of course the poor girl is as
much in the dark as I. Yes, I am awfully sorry for her. I’m afraid I
was rather a brute.”

“She doesn’t think you were,” said Leslie lightly.

“Have you seen her?” he asked quickly.

“This morning,” she nodded. “In fact, I lunched with her. We talked
over the whole grisly affair from A to Z. Are you very much in love
with her?”

He shook his head.

“I’m not in love with her at all. I suppose I ought to be, right down
in the deeps of my heart, but I’m not. And she is not in love with me,
either. I knew that seven years ago. She was not over-reticent when
she came to discuss our marriage before the separation. Did she tell
you anything at all about the boy?”

“Nothing. She really doesn’t know.”

He agreed.

“I was sure she didn’t. Bellini knows--no, I won’t call her princess
or Anita or anything feminine or human! She’s just a devil--a wicked
devil! How my father hated her! I’ve an idea he was a bit afraid of
her, too. I remember once he asked me, when we were walking together
at our place in Hertfordshire, if I liked her, and when I told him
that the sight of her made me ill, he put his hand in his pocket and
gave me a golden sovereign! And yet he must have been very fond of her
once.”

“Fond of her?” Leslie’s eyebrows met. “Do you seriously mean that?”

“I do. They say she was awfully attractive--not very pretty but very
attractive--when she was younger.”

Leslie pushed back her chair.

“This has been a most educational day!” she said. “Produce your
evidence, Mr. Dawlish, that your father was ever attracted by that
monstrous lady.”

He tried to turn the conversation, but she kept him to it
remorselessly.

“I shouldn’t have known, only my mother and the princess quarrelled. I
was curled up in a chair in the library--I must have been about
seven--reading one of the kind of books that my father used to buy for
me--about pirates and cutthroats and the usual exemplar of youth--when
they came into the library together. My mother was furious with
Bellini. I didn’t understand all it signified at the time, but later,
when I came to think it over, it seemed pretty plain. My mother was
furious. ‘You’ve had your inning,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like you any
more, and he doesn’t want you in the house. You won’t get him back,
anyway.’ There was a lot more said on both sides that I cannot
remember. I know that it ended in my mother crying and going out of
the room, and in Anita Bellini leaving the house. They must have been
on bad terms for two years, probably three. Time has no meaning to a
child.”

Leslie was chewing the end of a pen-holder.

“Then your father, in the argot of these days, was a bad lad?” she
said.

“I wouldn’t say that,” he protested. “He was a very simple man,
attracted by clever women; and Bellini was brilliant. I remember that
her husband was alive in those days--a very tall, thin, melancholy
Italian who spoke very bad English. My father and he were not very
good friends. I think Bellini had borrowed money and hadn’t repaid it,
and dear old Donald Dawlish was rather a stickler for commercial
honesty.”

And then, with a half-ashamed laugh:

“I don’t know why I should be slandering my father or gossiping when I
should have no other thought than of my boy. Did she tell you whether
she named it?”

“It was neither named nor registered,” was Leslie’s reply. “From that
point of view the child has no existence, and that is why he is going
to be so very difficult to trace.”

The pen quivered between her white teeth; she stared out of the
window.

“I wonder----” she said softly.

“What do you wonder?”

“If the other two pieces in this jig-saw puzzle are going to be so
easy to fit. And I wonder other things, Peter Dawlish. Where is the
screw I can turn on Anita Bellini? Give me that letter you had.”

He took it from his pocket and she read it.

“Who sent you this?”

“There was no name attached.”

She looked at the envelope and the postmark.

“This was sent by one who wishes to do either Jane or the princess a
pretty bad turn,” she said. “Now if I could only trace the sender----”

She lifted the letter to her nose and sniffed daintily.

“A clever detective would be able to tell in an instant if this
perfume was chenel No. 6 or chypre. I, being an ignoramus, only know
that Greta Gurden’s bedroom reeked with it!”




 CHAPTER XVIII.
 ANITA’S FRIGHT

At that moment Greta Gurden’s bedroom reeked with the pungent scent
of frying sausages that wafted in from the little gas-ring in her
“dining hall.” When Greta was her own provider, she was economical to
the point of stinginess. She, who would hesitate languidly between
sole Mariner and sole à la bonne femme, who chose the most delicate
and expensive of ices, and who had a pretty knowledge of the virtues
of relative vintages, when she had an escort to foot the bill, could
find, in the intimacy of her flat, the ingredients of complete
satisfaction hanging from a hook at the local butcher’s.

She had been allowed to get up that afternoon and found that she could
drag herself from room to room without pain or inconvenience. Mrs.
Hobbs had gone home, having a husband of her own to serve, and Greta
was left alone, and was glad.

Face-saving is a practice which is not wholly Chinese. When she
prepared her mean little snacks she liked to be by herself, for she
was one of those who desire to be thought well of by the least
accountable of people. She was almost cheerful as she speared the
sausages from their sizzling bed and laid them on a hot plate, brewed
the tea from a kettle placed before the gas stove, and, spreading a
cloth across half the table, prepared to enjoy her evening repast.

She had not heard from Anita since the woman’s visit, and she had
spent the greater part of the day regretting the spirit of malice
which had induced her to send an eight-year-old sheet of paper to
Peter Dawlish. Fortunately, Anita would never know; that was the one
solace she had. What would Anita say if she discovered? Greta
shuddered to think.

Being malicious, she was a coward; and it was cowardice which brought
about a revulsion of feeling toward the employer she betrayed. In the
processes of reaction, she felt almost tenderly toward the victim of
her spite. Nevertheless, the finding of the letter had given Greta an
idea. There might be other documents equally valuable, remembering
that the day was near at hand when her sole legitimate source of
income would perish in the inevitable liquidation of _Mayfair Gossip_.

It was all very well for Anita to sneer and rail at the paper, but it
had been a very good friend of hers. There were two prominent
announcements printed week after week in the pages of this scurrilous
little organ; the first of these was called “Stories of Real Life,”
and it was announced that for the sender of the best material from
which such a story could be constructed there was a weekly reward of
twenty-five pounds. Stress was laid upon one point, that the material
must be authentic, that it must be spicy, and that it must be
remarkable. The second announcement was to the effect that
contributors who were in a position to secure social items of interest
would be well paid.

These two appeals produced a voluminous correspondence, the majority
of which was valueless for their purpose; but sometimes an aggrieved
servant would reveal matters that were even outside the cognizance of
her employer. The maid who found a bundle of old love letters in a
secret drawer of her master’s desk was very well rewarded indeed.
Those letters went on to Anita, who found an excellent use for them.

Officially, Greta knew nothing of these matters. Officially, she was
sending on these letters because they had a piquant interest for her
employer. She was never asked to do anything that a lady could not do,
or even that Greta could not do. She made a very good use of the
smaller and less important items that reached the office, for Greta
was an efficient, if one-sided, journalist. She had one formula which
she followed in every case.


 Dear Anita: The inclosed letters are not, I am afraid, of much use
 to the paper. We shall be prosecuted for libel if we dare use one
 tenth of what is in them. They may, however, interest you.


The letter never varied; it had become almost a stereotype.

She contributed special articles to _Gossip_ and because of a sojourn
of fourteen days in the United States had become an authority upon the
Four Hundred, could talk glibly and inaccurately of the leaders of
society, and occasionally would introduce a Long Island colour to her
paragraphs. She could write fairly well, had a mordant wit of her own,
and in happier circumstances might have become a great journalist.
Instead of which she had developed insensibly into a cringing
sycophant, dependent upon a wage that was paid in all the
circumstances of charity.

As she ate her three large, indigestible sausages, she decided to
tackle that night the last bundle of letters which needed reading and
classifying. It was therefore not an inappropriate moment for Anita to
call. Mrs. Gurden stood up like a soldier when the woman swung into
the room and pulled the door close behind her.

“Your leg’s all right, is it? Good! I want you to come over to
Wimbledon to-night.”

“My dear Anita, I couldn’t possibly come to-night,” broke in Mrs.
Gurden, a picture of sweetness and delight at seeing this unwelcome
visitor. “The doctor says----”

“I don’t care what the doctor says,” replied Anita brusquely. “You’ve
got to come over to May Towers.”

Greta murmured something half-heartedly, and made a final fight.

“It may be fatal,” she said in a hushed voice. “The doctor----”

Princess Bellini said something very uncomplimentary about doctors in
general, and glanced at the remnants of the humble meal with a sneer
which she did not attempt to conceal.

“Pack all your things, everything you want for a long stay,” she said.
“I’ll send one of my people up to help you if you like, but it would
be better if your own woman--Snobbs or Hobbs or whatever you call
her--helped you.”

“How long do you want me to stay?” asked Greta in consternation. She
counted the most unhappy days and nights of her life those she had
spent as Anita’s guest.

“A month; six weeks possibly--I’m not sure,” said the woman brusquely.
“I’m going to pay you very well indeed. As for your leg, I’ve
telephoned to your doctor and he tells me that you’re fit to move, and
in fact the wound is healed.”

“But the paper----”

“The paper is dead. I’ve written to the printers telling them so. My
lawyer will liquidate the business, so that’s off your mind. You’ve
got to do something, Greta. Your source of income from that direction
has dried up.”

Greta listened in dismay, and offered the weak comment that it “seemed
a pity.” And then, with a resolution which was born of her very
feebleness, she said:

“I can’t go. I simply won’t go, Anita, until I’ve seen the doctor.
You’re most inconsiderate! I haven’t recovered. It isn’t only the
wound, it’s the shock of--Druze’s death. I simply won’t risk my life.
After all, I have to take care of myself. Gurden doesn’t care a darn
whether I’m alive or dead.”

Anita sat squarely before her, her big hands on her knees, her
eyeglass fixed in her impassive face.

“Gurden!” she rasped. “You almost make this ghost of yours real!
You’ve got to the end of your argument, Greta, when you call on the
precious name of Gurden. He belongs to the same order as Mrs. ’Arris.”

“It’s not true, it’s not true!” protested the haggard woman tearfully.
“We’re married but we’re separated.”

Nevertheless, she proceeded to give no further details that would
elucidate that mystery of her life.

“Whether you are or whether you’re not, you’re to come over to May
Towers,” said the princess definitely. “If you want to see a doctor,
you can send for any one you like.”

Greta elected for her own doctor, but he was out and not expected back
until late that night. She ran her fingers down the directory of the
profession, seeking a familiar name, and presently she found one and
rang him up. Anita, renovating her toilet before the looking glass in
the bedroom, heard Greta speaking in her sugary society voice, and
smiled grimly.

“If you please, Doctor. I wondered if you would remember me. It’s most
awfully kind of you--no, only a little scratch. The wound has quite
healed, I’m sure, but I should like to see you ever so much.”

There was a click as the receiver was hung up. Anita smoothed the
powder on her face, gave her large, shapeless lips a touch of a red,
creamy stick, and strolled back to the dining room.

“Well, have you found your doctor?”

“Yes, Anita, I have,” said the other. “He’s a very nice man and he
won’t let me go out if he thinks that it’s dangerous to my health. And
really, I must consider myself, Anita, sometimes. I’m not at all well,
and I’ve been thinking for a long time of placing myself in a doctor’s
hands----”

“Whom have you sent for?”

“Doctor Elford Wesley. He used to be old Mr. Dawlish’s doctor----”

She heard a growl like the sound of a beast and stared aghast at
Anita. Her eyes were wide open; she showed her teeth in an ugly grin.

“You brainless fool!” she exclaimed. “Why did you send for him?”




 CHAPTER XIX.
 CAPTURED

Demoniacal, terrifying, she towered above the frightened woman, and
Greta cowered and held up her hand as though to ward off a blow.

“Get on the telephone, quick, and tell him he needn’t come. Invent any
excuse you like! Hurry!”

In a trembling voice Greta called the number.

“He’s gone,” she said, and looked up at her mistress.

“All right, hang up, you fool!” Anita was breathing quickly. New lines
showed in her face; she looked like an old woman.

“Send somebody down to the door and tell him he needn’t come.”

“But, Anita,” wailed the other, “I can’t do that! I must see him,
Nita. What a stupid thing you are! What difference does it make? If
you don’t like him you needn’t show yourself. And if I send down a
message like that he’ll be awfully suspicious! You remember how the
police came just because my wretched doctor told somebody I had a
gunshot wound in the leg?”

There was reason and intelligence in this, and though the woman was
quivering between fear and fury, she had no course but to assent, and
when, ten minutes later, the doctor’s foot sounded on the stairs
outside, Anita Bellini disappeared into the bedroom, but did not go
beyond earshot.

He was an elderly man, rather talkative and fussy, short and stout,
with a cherubic face and short white side whiskers.

“Bless my soul, I remember you now!” he said. He was one of the loud
and jovial race of doctors that is fast dying out. “I remember you
very well. You used to be a friend of the Dawlishes, didn’t you? Poor
old Donald! What a good sort! Now let me look at this leg of yours.”

He examined the wound, which was little more than a scar, and, to
Greta’s dismay, pronounced her fit to travel.

“You’ll have to take care of yourself for a week or two,” he said
conventionally, and returned to the topic his examination had
interrupted. “Yes. I was with old Donald two days before he died, from
morning till night, hoping against hope that I could do something for
him. For twenty-four hours I never stirred from his side. Poor old
Donald! He died six hours after I left him, with my dear friend, Sir
Paul Grayley, one of the best doctors that ever lived.”

Old Dr. Wesley was blessed with this disposition, that all the people
he knew were the best people that ever lived, and all who were bereft
of his acquaintance came under the generic heading of “poor souls.”

“Very bad business about his boy, poor soul!” He shook his hoary head.
“Terribly bad business. I didn’t know Peter personally--never met him.
But when I heard of this fearful thing he’d done, I said to myself,
‘My boy, if the news has to be broken to Donald you’re the man to do
it.’”

He was very talkative, very delightful, very human, but Greta was
annoyed with him and gave him little encouragement to stay. As for the
woman standing in the darkness of the bedroom, had her wishes
materialized, old Doctor Wesley would have been swept from the face of
the earth.

Presently he was gone, and she came out from her listening post.

“Apparently you can move without dying,” she said sarcastically.

“Apparently I can, if I want to move.” Greta’s voice was husky. She
was back in her last trench, conscious of a great shortage of
ammunition. “And I don’t want to move, and that’s flat! I can’t
understand why you hate that dear old man. I admit he’s fearfully
chatty, but that’s no reason why you should throw a fit at the mention
of his name.”

“When I want your opinion about my peculiarities I will ask you for
it,” bullied Anita, and it was a wrong move, as she realized.

Mrs. Gurden shrugged her shoulders rapidly.

“If that’s the tone you’re going to adopt,” she said, with an heroic
assumption of boldness, “the sooner we part the better, Anita. You’ve
stopped the paper, but I think I’m entitled to some money instead of
notice; and if it comes to that, I’ve had no salary for a month. And
as to going down to your beastly old Towers, I simply won’t, so
there!”

The princess forced a smile.

“My dear Greta, you’re getting theatrical. But I realize you’re not
quite yourself. Now don’t be a little fool. Come and rest with me for
a week or two. There are one or two big schemes I want to talk over
with you, and afterward we’ll pack up and go to Capri or Monte Carlo
or somewhere’s a little more cheerful than Wimbledon.”

“I won’t!”

It required a tremendous amount of courage to utter those two words of
defiance, but it was zero hour to Greta Gurden, and for the moment she
had all the ferocity of a mad sheep.

“I simply won’t! If I’ve got to earn my own living, I’ll earn it. I
can get a job on _Fleet Fashions_. I was offered one last week. I’m
tired of your domination and your bullying, and--well, I simply won’t
go to Wimbledon, and that’s a fact!”

Here was a resistance which Anita Bellini had never anticipated. There
was not the stuff of sweet reasonableness in her. She had made her way
in the world by the force of her character, and her simulations had
been confined to hiding her too-frequent fits of anger. It was not in
her to persuade; she must command or do nothing.

“You’re going to make me look foolish. I’ve promised----”

“I don’t care what I make you look.” Greta’s head was quivering with
determination. “It’s not my fault. And whom have you promised?”

Without waiting for a reply, she said:

“You know how I loathe that house at Wimbledon and those awfully
creepy Japanese men of yours.”

“Javanese. They’re quite nice people. If you refer to your
encyclopædia you will discover they are inoffensive, peace loving,
and domestic.”

But sarcasm was wasted on Greta.

“That may be or may not be,” she said. “All I know is that I’m not
coming with you.”

“Stay and be--stay till to-morrow!” exclaimed the elder woman. “I
shan’t waste my time or go down on my hands and knees to you. You owe
me a lot, Greta----”

“You owe me a month’s salary,” said the spirited Greta, with admirable
courage, “and three months’ notice.”

Her hands trembling with rage, Anita tore open her bag and flung a
packet of one-pound notes on the table. Without another word she
strode out of the room and shut the door so violently that the whole
house shook.

Greta Gurden sat bolt upright, shivering with triumph, yet with a
sinking sense of terror at what the morrow would bring forth. She had
charred her boats but she had not burned them. Her shaking hand
grabbed the telephone.

“Put me on to Scotland Yard,” she said.

She heard the weary sigh of the operator.

“Is Scotland Yard blessed with a number?” she asked.

Greta hung up the phone and looked round in search of the directory.
But apparently Scotland Yard had no number, nor did there seem to be
such a place on the face of the earth. She was to learn later that the
official designation was New Scotland Yard, but she did not dream of
looking under the “N’s.” And then she remembered Leslie Maughan, and
the “M’s” yielded a good result. She waited for a while after she had
given the number, and then:

“Yes. I want to speak to you.”

“Yes, Mrs. Gurden.”

Greta started.

“How did you know?”

She heard a laugh.

“I always remember voices, especially nice voices like yours,” said
the mendacious young lady from Scotland Yard.

“I want to see you very much--very badly, I mean--tremendously.”

“In fact, you want to see me,” said Leslie. “I’ll come along.”

It required some persuasion to induce Lucretia to wait for the arrival
of Mr. Coldwell.

“Very well, then,” said Leslie patiently. “Wait in the street. You’ll
catch your death of cold, but I don’t suppose that will worry you very
much. You might even hobnob with a policeman. I trust you.”

“I should jolly well say you did!” said the indignant Lucretia.

She compromised by sitting on the baggage in the passage, the door
being propped open with a weight. She found it a little more drafty
than the street.

Greta’s boats seemed a little more burned than she could have desired
when she surveyed the desolation just before Leslie’s arrival. She had
little stamina for quarrelling, and already her mind was a confusion
of fear and penitence when Mrs. Hobbs, who had returned for her
evening duties, showed the girl into the dining room.

“It’s awfully good of you to come.” Greta was her conventional self;
grabbed the girl’s hand in both of hers; used that old and artless
trick of looking up pleadingly into her visitor’s face. “I’m so
worried, my dear. The truth is, I’ve quarrelled with Anita. Definitely
and finally,” she said, recovering a little of her lost ground. “The
paper is dead, as you’ve probably heard--you know everything at
Scotland Yard. That means I’m out of a job, though I can get one
to-morrow by asking. Anita has behaved abominably. I should never have
dreamed, after all I’ve been to her, the thought and care and
experience I have devoted to her, as it were---- Do take your hat and
coat off. Shall I ask the maid to make you a cup of tea?”

Leslie, secretly amused, shook her head. She guessed that the woman
had changed her mind since she first sent for her. It was hardly
likely that she would trouble to telephone about one of those quarrels
which, if her information was accurate, were not an infrequent
occurrence between Greta Gurden and the princess.

“Of course, I’ve nothing to tell you that would harm Anita.” Mrs.
Gurden planted one foot firmly on shore, and prepared, figuratively,
to splash the waves of her venom with the other. “But she’s so
peculiar--and such a temper! I shouldn’t be surprised if she goes off
in a fit of apoplexy one of these days.”

“What is her trouble now?”

Greta could tell her this much, she decided, without disloyalty to her
late employer. The very thought that she was “late” filled her with
dismay.

“She wanted me to go to Wimbledon to stay there for a month, and I
hate the place, I simply loathe it! I’m rather temperamental; I
suppose all artists are--I mean artists and literary people. And May
Towers gives me the horrors. And, of course, she was terribly rude to
me, in spite of the fact that I am far from well and my leg aches
excruciatingly. Anita is the most unreasonable person. You’ve no idea,
Miss Maughan. Of course we quarrelled, and I simply told her that I’d
have no more to do with her. And then she made a fearful scene because
I asked old Doctor Wesley to come up and see me and tell me whether I
was fit to be moved. She practically cursed me for calling him.
Really, I thought she was going mad. And he’s such a dear old
soul--awfully talkative, of course, but a perfect gentleman, and a
kind man.”

Leslie was sitting at the other side of the table, her hands folded
patiently, waiting for the real story to come. Now she leaned forward,
her eyes upon the woman’s face.

“Doctor Wesley? Was he the Dawlishes’ doctor?”

“A very charming old man but awfully fond of Mr. Dawlish. Except for
six hours just before his death, he was with old Mr. Dawlish for a
whole day and a night--never left his side.”

Leslie hardly heard the next five minutes’ complaint, but when she
came to bring her understanding to bear upon her hostess, Greta was
not much nearer to the reason for her telephone message.

“If anything comes out I can always say, and Anita must bear me out,
that I never knew this wretched man was a woman. The first thing I saw
was Anita and this man struggling, and I wanted to send for the
police. And then those wretched men came in and tried to drag the
pistol out of Druze’s hand--her hand, I mean. And there was I, lying
on a sofa--fainted, my dear, and with simply not a notion in the world
that I was wounded. It may sound strange to you, but it is true. When
I woke up, Anita was going on like somebody who had lost her head. It
was simply ghastly.”

“Did you see Druze again?”

Greta shook her head.

“No--the language she used before the shooting started!” Greta
shuddered. “I simply couldn’t repeat half the words she employed. Of
course, Anita sent me out of the room; said she didn’t know I was
there; but just as I started to go out, my dear--bang!” Mrs. Gurden
grew dramatic and illustrative. “Bang! And then everything went dark.
You know how it does, my dear.”

“I can’t understand quite,” said Leslie. “A few hours after the
shooting I found you at Lady Raytham’s.”

“She sent me--Anita,” Mrs. Gurden broke in. “‘Go to Jane, but tell her
nothing,’ said Anita. ‘Find out all that you can about Druze--how they
parted, if she threatened her.’ Those were her words. You know
Anita--she’s--what is the word? Imperious! I didn’t know whether I was
on my head or my heels--like that Mr. What’s-his-name who’s written a
story about women. I simply had to! And not an idea in my head that a
beastly bullet had gone into my leg. The doctor said that if I hadn’t
run about the wound would have healed right away. It was only when I
got home, my dear, I nearly died!”

She paused to take breath.

“I suppose she’ll come to-morrow and ask me to go back. I’m such a
forgiving nature.”

“If there is anything in life that you value, you will stay here, Mrs.
Gurden,” said Leslie quietly. “I don’t want to frighten you, but I
think it is my duty to warn you that the Princess Bellini’s course is
nearly run. As to Druze----”

She had never thought that Druze was murdered; always she had had at
the back of her mind the possibility of a struggle in which the shots
were accidentally fired. There was a good and sufficient reason why
Anita Bellini should not shoot the mock butler.

When she reached her flat, the front door was closed. She opened it
and turned on the passage light. Lucretia and the grips were gone, she
saw with satisfaction. In the letter box was a blue-lettered cablegram
and she snatched it out and opened it. This was a reply to one she had
sent on her way back from lunch, and she read the message and could
have sung in her joy.

She ran up the stairs, her mind divided between this blessed message
and her interview with Greta Gurden. Greta was in revolt; that much
was clear. But how far would her rage and venom carry her toward a
complete betrayal of her employer? As she passed the hall window, she
noticed that the new safety catch was in place. Really it was
ridiculous to leave the flat at all, she thought. After that one
attempt it was not likely that a second would be made.

She almost regretted now that she had agreed to Mr. Coldwell’s plan.
Throwing open the door of her sitting room, she put out her hand and
turned the light switch. But the room remained in darkness. Had they
replaced the fuses? she wondered, and walked into the room.

There was no sound, no warning. A great hand suddenly gripped her
throat, another covered her mouth. She felt the pressure of a knee in
her back and struggled desperately but unavailingly.

“You scream--you killed!” whispered a voice in her ear, and, summoning
all her strength, she tried to nod in agreement with the unspoken
demand of her captor.

The door closed softly behind her. There were two men. She felt her
ankles gripped and lifted, and she was carried into the bedroom and
laid on the bed.

“You scream--you killed!” said the voice again.

The grip about her throat relaxed, but the evil-smelling hand was
still on her face.

“I won’t scream,” she managed to mumble, and the stifling palm was
removed.

“You scream, I cut your t’roat. You not scream, I not cut your
t’roat--not hurt.”

“I shan’t scream,” she said in a low voice. “May I get up, please?”

There was a whispered consultation in a language which held some
gutturals, and then the man who had first spoken said:

“You sit on a chair, keep very quiet, long time, long time.”

He gripped her by the arm and assisted her back to the dining room,
guiding her to a chair, though there was enough light from a street
lamp for her to pick her way.

There were two men--little men; their heads were not much above her
shoulder. Broad, squat, and, as she had reason to know, immensely
strong. She could not see their faces; by accident or arrangement
their backs were to the window. He who was evidently chief of the two
said something in an unknown language, and his companion withdrew to
the landing, and the hall and landing lights went out. Presently he
came back, and, to her surprise, he was joined by a third. Again there
was a whispered consultation, and the third man disappeared, the other
two squatting on the carpet before her, impassive, silent, watching,
as she guessed, with eyes that did not leave her for a second. A
quarter of an hour they sat thus, and then:

“I speak English liddle bit. I hear English well,” said the man. “I
tell you trut’. Last night you get t’roat cut. This night no hurt.” He
added a phrase she could not understand.

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

“Presently by and by,” said the little man, after he had repeated her
words slowly and had grasped their meaning, “you and me walk into car.
While you walk you see peoples. If you speak to peoples I cut your
t’roat.”

Very definite, but the repetition of the phrase amused her mildly.

“You’re rather monotonous, aren’t you?” she asked. “And after I get
into the car what happens?”

There was a pause while he took this in.

“By and by you see,” he said.

The third man came back now, and she gathered that he was in reality
the leading member of the gang, for on his word the two others
vanished through the door and he took their place.

“You won’t be hurt unless you give us trouble,” he said. To her
surprise he spoke in perfect English. “My patron requires you.”

“Who is your patron?”

It gave her a sense of comfort to know that this queer little shape
could understand all she said, and could converse intelligently. It
made him less of a strange and menacing animal, and removed some of
the terror from the situation. And it delayed the moment when she
would find her cumbersome garter a vital safeguard.

“I cannot answer your questions, miss,” he replied. “But you will not
be hurt. Last night you would have been killed--I myself would have
killed you--but that is not the order to-day. If you are sensible and
quiet, nothing will happen.”

He stood up and looked out of the window; neither the shades nor the
curtains had been drawn, and he could see to the opposite side of the
road.

“I must tell you what will occur,” he said. He had a trick of pedantry
which might have amused her at any other time. “This house is being
watched by the police. After a while they will grow tired and
careless, and then my friend will signal to me that they have walked
away. When that happens we will go.”

She could not see him; she could only guess that his “friend” was one
of the two. She had noticed that all three were dressed in correct
European garb, and the incongruity of their overcoats and derby hats
added a touch of the bizarre.

“Will you therefore sit nearer to the window, at your writing place?
If the telephone rings you will not answer.”

So they sat, he on one side of the table and she on the other, his
eyes roving to the sidewalk, and from the sidewalk to his prisoner.
She saw the limousines stream past on their way to the theatres, and
wondered if, on any stage in London, there would be enacted a drama
quite as improbable as this in which she played a leading part.

After a long interval of silence:

“I suppose you realize that, when I do not arrive at Mr. Coldwell’s
house, he will either telephone or come back for me?”

He nodded.

“We have already made provision,” he said simply. “We have sent him a
telegram in your name, saying that you have been called away to”--he
hesitated--“I cannot remember the town; it is in the west and is on
the sea.”

“Plymouth?” she asked quickly.

“Plymouth,” he said. “The telegram also told him your hotel. Plymouth
is very far, and by the time he discovers you have not arrived”--a
pause--“by that time you will not be here.”

“Where shall I be?” she asked.

But the only answer was a strange, solemn glance.




 CHAPTER XX.
 A SILK SHAWL

Children--little Elizabeth and that unseen boy of his! Peter Dawlish
walked up and down his cramped room, his hands in his pockets, an
unlighted cigarette between his lips. The hopelessness of it all!
Where and how could he begin his search? That baby of his belonged to
the world of unreality, to the mists of dreams. Elizabeth was real. He
could see those wide, frightened eyes of hers, the transparent pallor
of her face. He shut his eyes and there she was again, frail,
delicate, pleading for help he was powerless to give.

He was alone in the house. Through the thin partition walls which
separated one jerry-built cottage from the other he heard the sound of
a man and a wife quarrelling. In the street a boy was whistling flatly
a popular tune. If Mrs. Inglethorne were here he would have the truth
though he had to choke it from her. Who else would know but she?

He had been such a short time in the lodging that he was not even
acquainted with her friends; the slinking little thieves who came to
barter and haggle over the property they had stolen knew no more of
her than that she was a mean and grinding bargainer. She had no
cronies to come and spend the evening with her; by very reason of her
peculiar business, she could not risk the giving or taking of
confidences.

The police had been to the house and made a perfunctory search, their
object being to discover other evidence against her. But they had
looked only for articles of value which she might have purchased;
lengths of cloth and silk--she specialized in this trade--and they
were not particularly concerned about Elizabeth. Nobody cared very
much about Elizabeth, except Leslie and he.

This thought occurred to him as he walked to and fro--and thought
breeds thought. Might he not, searching with another object, discover
what they had overlooked--one fragment of a clue that would bring him
to the child? Why should he be concerned? What legal or moral right
had he to detach Mrs. Inglethorne’s daughter from her legal guardian?
He considered this matter, only to brush it aside. Presently he
carried the lamp downstairs, with the faintly pleasurable hope which
comes to all who engage in secret searches.

The woman’s room was accessible. The lock he had broken had not been
repaired. He went in, put the lamp on the mantelpiece and looked
around. Search parties usually leave chaos behind them, but the police
in their investigation had, if anything, tidied the room. There were a
number of dresses, obviously the woman’s, stacked on the bed. Two
oleographs that once decorated the wall had been lifted down--clean
squares on the wall paper marked their old position. By the side of
the clothes was a square wooden box, of the kind that soldiers use for
the transportation of their possessions. This had been opened and was
unlocked. The lid had jammed upon a wedge of cloth as it had been
closed, and there was a gap of an inch.

Where would a woman like Mrs. Inglethorne keep papers? Or did she keep
papers at all? He tried to remember the habits of her type, acquired
at second hand from his fortuitous acquaintances in Dartmoor Prison.
Under her bed? But the police had obviously rolled up the mattress and
made that elementary examination. There was nothing here--nothing. He
opened the big black box, disparagingly. And then he saw, with a
quickening interest, that the inside of the lid was almost covered by
newspaper cuttings which had been pasted on the wood. Here was
revealed Mrs. Inglethorne’s “scrap-book,” and incidentally her
favourite daydream. A headline caught his eye.


 HEIRESS TRACED BY HER BABY SOCK


Another headline ran:


 CHILD’S MOTHER TRACKED BY INITIAL ON
 INFANT’S GOWN


He carried the lamp to a little table and read the cuttings carefully.
They all dealt with one subject: The identification of unknown
children that had brought fabulous fortunes to the lucky person who
had traced their descent. Some of the cuttings were very old, yellow
with age, and scarcely decipherable. Evidently Mrs. Inglethorne’s
collection covered a long period.

He supposed the police had searched the box, which was nearly filled
with little cylinder-shaped bundles tied around with tape. Linen,
coarse calico, cotton--diving into the mass, his fingers touched silk.
The bundles had once been white, but constant fingering and dust had
left them an indescribable hue. He untied a bundle and opened it. It
consisted of a child’s cotton nightdress, a little pair of woollen
shoes, and a small knitted shawl. Pinned to the shoes was a scrap of
paper on which was written in an illiterate hand the words: “Mrs.
Larse, boy, ten days old, measles, nine months.” Here then was the
beginning and end of Mrs. Larse’s boy. “Measles, nine months” was his
epitaph.

She was a baby farmer; he had guessed that. He opened another bundle
hopefully. Somewhere here would be a reference to Elizabeth. The
second package had nothing but a coarse calico robe and a penned
inscription: “Young girl named Leavey, five days, whooping cough, six
weeks.” One by one he unrolled these little tragedies, and few indeed
were they who had not their death certificates inscribed laconically
at the end. Some had two papers, identically inscribed. He supposed
that the repetition was due to Mrs. Inglethorne’s careless and
haphazard system of “bookkeeping.”

He had examined twelve and took out the thirteenth, wondering what
potency there was in that lucky or unlucky number. The nightdress he
unrolled was of the finest linen, the most expensive of all he had
examined. The shawl was of heavy silk, and the microscopic shirt of
the most delicate flannel. For some time he could not find the
inscription, but eventually it was discovered inside the shawl. Only
three words, but they set his heart beating.

“Miss Martha’s girl.”

The bundle dropped from his nerveless hands. “Miss Martha’s girl!”

He took the letter out of his pocket. “I have found a home for your
son and----” He read again the pencilled words “Martha’s servant.” And
Martha’s servant was--Mrs. Inglethorne!

Miss Martha’s girl. This woman could not have made a mistake. One by
one he examined the clothes separately, and then, pinned to the inside
of the dress, near the collar, he found a second paper written in the
same hand, and, reading it, he uttered a hoarse cry.

“Miss Martha’s girl Elizabeth.”

Feverishly he untied the other bundles but found no further clue. His
knees were trembling as he mounted the stairs, the precious garments
close to his heart. Putting down the lamp on the table, he examined
again these pitiful souvenirs. He must see Leslie at once. Not daring
to leave the clothes behind, he folded them and put them into his
pocket. He used the silk shawl as a neckcloth under his thin overcoat;
the night was bitterly cold, but it was not the warmth of the soft
fabric which brought a glow to his heart.

The windows of the flat were in darkness, but he remembered that they
had heavy velvet curtains, and possibly they were drawn. Ringing the
bell, he waited. There was no answer. He rang again. And then a man
appeared from a near-by doorway and strolled up to him.

“Who do you want?” he asked, in a tone of authority. Peter guessed
that he was a detective.

“I want Miss Maughan. My name is Dawlish.”

“Oh, Dawlish, yes. Miss Maughan isn’t in. She is staying at Inspector
Coldwell’s house in Finchley. There is nobody in the flat.”

He did not hide his disappointment; he was so full of his discovery
that he had to tell somebody. He had to see her. The detective gave
him the inspector’s address and he walked across the Charing Cross
Road, intending to make his way to the tube station. He reached the
other side of the road, and then something made him look back at the
windows of her apartments. And in that instant he saw a quick flicker
of light, as though somebody had turned on an electric hand lamp for
the fraction of a second and had extinguished it immediately.

Peter stopped. Somebody was in Leslie’s room. He walked slowly across
the road. The detective had disappeared; was, in point of fact,
walking to the back of the block to visit his fellow watcher. As Peter
stood, hesitating, he saw the street door move slightly, and, acting
on an impulse, he pushed it wide open and took one step into the
darkness.

“Who’s there?” he said, and that was all that he remembered.

Something soft and heavy fell with a thud on his head, crushing his
soft hat as though it were paper. He stumbled on to his knees, and a
second blow laid him prostrate, the blood trickling down his face and
staining the soft silk that had once enwrapped his child.

There were no loiterers in Charing Cross Road that bitter night, when
a chill northwest wind sent people hurrying to the shelter of their
homes. There was no lounger to tell the detective of three people who
had walked hurriedly across the sidewalk into the car which was
drawing to the curb at the very moment Peter pushed open the door.




 CHAPTER XXI.
 ANITA’S CARDS

As the car moved off a man came running across the road, stepped
lightly on to the foot-board and wriggled his way to a place beside
the driver. The car was held up outside the Hippodrome but only for a
few seconds, and then, turning, it sped wheezily along Coventry
Street. They had a good crossing of Piccadilly Circus, and a few
seconds later they had struck the gloom of lower Piccadilly and had
turned into Hyde Park.

Leslie had a glimpse now of the faces of her captors: yellow, with
that Oriental slant of the eye which is common to the Chinese and
Japanese. Here the likeness ended; their faces lacked the intelligence
of the people of the island kingdoms.

Javanese, of course! How stupid she had been not to have realized that
from the first! Anita Bellini had lived in Java for many years. And
then she remembered Peter’s words. She understood the chained door
because of the attack that had been made on her flat. Anita’s
bodyguard had been engaged elsewhere; she had need of chains to
protect her house in their absence.

The car slipped across Hammersmith Bridge, and after a few minutes she
could identify the spot where the body of Druze had been found. They
were going to Wimbledon, then--to Anita’s grisly house.

The machine came to a stop before the door of May Towers and she
hurried up the steps. She had not reached the top before the door was
opened. No light showed in the hall, and she heard the door clang
behind her and a chain rattle as it was fastened, and her courage
almost deserted her. Somebody flashed the light of a hand lamp; she
saw the wide, heavily carpeted stairs.

“Go up,” said her conductor, his hand still on her arm, and she
obeyed.

The stairs turned and they reached a wide landing. Somebody knocked at
a door, and a voice which she recognized as Anita’s said:

“Come in.”

The man who had knocked pushed the door open wide. She had a glimpse
of a lofty wall, hidden by a black curtain which was covered with
curious designs in gold threadwork. The room was filled with an
unearthly greenish light; the hand of the jailer fell from her arm;
she walked into the room alone, and the door closed behind her.

It was a long and ill-proportioned salon. With the exception of a
divan at the far end and a low table near by, it was bare of
furniture. The carpet underfoot was either purple or black; in the
queer light of two green lamps that burned on either side of the
settee it was impossible to distinguish its colour.

Anita Bellini sat cross-legged on the divan, horribly suggestive of
some repellent and grotesque idol in her golden frock. Her massive
arms were smothered from wrist to elbow with glittering bracelets.
Three ropes of pearls hung about her strong neck, and every time her
hands moved they sparkled and scintillated brilliantly. A long ebony
cigarette holder was between her lips; that immovable monocle of hers
gleamed greenly.

“Come along, Maughan; sit here.” She pointed to the floor, and, black
against black, invisible from where she had paused when she had
entered the room, Leslie saw a heap of cushions.

She sat obediently, looking up into the coarse face. So they sat
surveying one another for a space, and then, flicking the ash from her
cigarette, Anita Bellini spoke.

“You have brains, I suppose?”

“I suppose so,” said Leslie coolly.

“Sufficient brains to know that I wouldn’t take the risk of bringing
you here--abducting is the word, I think--unless my position was
rather desperate. I’d have killed you last night, but that would have
been a fatal mistake. You are much more useful to me alive.”

Leslie smiled faintly.

“Which sounds like a line from a melodrama!” she said.

“The Javanese are a gentle, kindly people,” Anita said slowly, “but in
some ways--they are not nice.”

“I understand this is a threat as to what will happen to me if I do
not do something you wish?”

“You’re a sensible girl,” said Anita Bellini, and leaned forward, her
elbows on her knees. She was very much like a fishwife in that
attitude; there was something inexpressibly common about her, in spite
of her monocle and her Parisian gown, and the luxury of her
surroundings. “This afternoon”--she was still speaking very slowly and
distinctly--“Coldwell applied to the Bow Street magistrate for a
warrant--a warrant for my arrest and a search of this house. Did you
know that?”

Leslie was genuinely astonished and shook her head.

“I had no idea, and I can’t think that what you say is true,” she
said. “Mr. Coldwell made no mention of any such arrest; in fact, I was
spending the night at his house, and I know he had arranged----”

Anita broke into her explanation.

“He applied. Whether the warrant was granted or not, I do not know.
That is one point. Another is this: you visited Greta Gurden to-night,
and she told you the one thing in the world I wished that she should
not tell--I know because I saw you go in and come out of her flat, and
I have seen Greta since,” she added grimly. “It isn’t necessary for me
to tell you the vital information you discovered.”

“It isn’t,” said Leslie. “But I might have found that out anyway. In
fact, I should, if I’d had the sense to go straight to Doctor Wesley
and ask him how long before Donald Dawlish’s death he was unconscious.
I’ve always suspected that the alteration of that will was a forgery.
I saw a copy of it, and I have compared it with the signature of
Donald Dawlish. It would not have been very difficult to prove that
the new will which gave Mrs. Dawlish the whole of her husband’s
fortune and which disinherited Peter, was a forgery from beginning to
end. The doctor will, of course, prove that beyond any question. On
the day he was supposed to have made the new will, Mr. Dawlish did not
recover consciousness. Surely, Princess, you don’t imagine that you
will get away with that! Mr. Dawlish’s lawyers have always been
dissatisfied with the will that was made without consultation, and
which was only proved because they could not induce Peter Dawlish to
contest its validity.”

Anita Bellini made no answer to this.

“I’m chiefly concerned with myself and my own safety,” she said at
last. “You’ve got to help me, and Martha must look after herself.
You’ve got to help clear me. I’m going to make you a very good
offer--a hundred thousand pounds.”

Leslie shook her head.

“Not all the money in the world will influence me, Princess,” she
said. “How could I clear you? You talk as though I were the chief of
the Detective Bureau and had authority to divert the processes of the
law! The person you must see is Lady Raytham, whom you have
blackmailed for years, and even if she were agreeable, the law
requires that you shall explain the death of Annie Druze.”

“It was an accident.”

Leslie nodded.

“I know--or rather, I guessed. But that has got to come into the
light, and it cannot come into the light unless the story of the
blackmail is revealed. I am willing to do this: let me walk out of
your door unharmed, and the little adventure of to-night will be
forgotten. I will forget your Javanese, I will forget what happened
last night. Tell me where I can find”--she paused--“Elizabeth
Dawlish.”

“There is no such person,” said Anita harshly.

“Elizabeth Dawlish,” repeated Leslie, “Peter’s daughter.”

Princess Anita Bellini was not smoking now. She had the holder in her
hand, turning it over and over and examining it critically as though
she were looking for some defect.

“You’ve got to get me out of this mess, Leslie Maughan.”

Leslie rose to her feet.

“I thought you were clever!” she said, with a note of contempt in her
voice. “Nothing can get you out--nothing!”

“Is that so?” Anita’s voice was soft and silky. “Do you realize, my
good woman, that if I can’t get out, who has put me in--you! You’ve
been prying into the history of the Druzes, have you? Ah, ha!” She
laughed harshly. “I know a great deal more than you imagine. And
you’ve been putting the little pieces together to trap Anita--poor old
Anita, eh?” She showed her big white teeth in a mirthless smile, and
suddenly slipped from the divan and drew near to the girl. She clapped
her hands twice.

The room was seemingly empty; yet at that signal half a dozen little
men appeared as if by magic from behind the long curtains. Anita, her
face swollen with rage, spluttered something and the squat shapes came
shuffling toward her.

Leslie did not move. She stood erect, her hands by her sides, her pale
face turned to the woman. Even when they seized her, she did not
resist, but allowed herself to be hurried behind the fold of a curtain
and through a door into a stuffy little room into which she was
thrust. The door was closed on her, a lock snapped; from the other
side of the door a mocking voice called to her.

“Now I will be avenged.”

Leslie stooped, pulled up her skirt, and unstrapped an appendage from
a garter. It was a small-calibre weapon. She slipped back the jacket,
forced in a cartridge, and brought the catch to safety. Then she began
to explore.

The furniture of the room was a little tawdry. The divan, which seemed
an indispensable adjunct to every room, was old and worn; a shaded
light hung from the ceiling; there were two brass dishes attached to
the wall. It appeared to be the apartment of a highly favoured upper
servant, and this she confirmed when she turned over the coverings of
the divan and saw what was apparently a suit of native clothing.

There was a second door to the room and this she tried. Then, to her
surprise and delight, she saw that there was a key on the outside. She
turned this, and to her relief it opened, and she found herself in a
very conventional bedroom, the type of apartment she would have
expected to discover in any of the houses on Wimbledon Common. No
lights were burning and it was inadvisable to switch them on. Softly
she closed the door of the room she had left, and tiptoeing across the
floor, felt her way to the bedroom door. She turned the handle softly
and looked out.

Happily, the two men who stood on the landing had their backs turned
to her. She closed the door again, in an agony of fear lest she should
make a sound. Running quickly across the bedroom, she tried the
windows. They were not only fastened and barred, but, as a further
barrier to egress, the bars were covered with a stout wire screen.
Perhaps there was a bathroom, she thought, and groped along the wall.
After a while she felt the handle of a door and opened it gingerly.
She must risk putting on the light for a second, and this she did.

It was evidently used as a dressing room, and there was another door
which, she guessed, led to a second bedroom. She turned out the
lights; the door was locked, and again the key was on the outside. For
a moment she suspected a trap and hesitated, but after a moment turned
the key and entered the room, only to draw back instantly. Somebody
was there; she heard the sound of breathing, and a tiny creak as
though a body was turning in bed. And then:

“Who is it, please?” asked a voice, and Leslie nearly dropped.

For the child who spoke from the darkness was Elizabeth!

“Don’t make a sound,” she whispered, and, taking out the key, closed
the door and locked it on the inside.

Only then did she feel for the light switch. The room was a small one
and apparently there was no other way out than that by which she had
come. The small window was barred and wired; the window itself was of
opaque glass. She looked round at Elizabeth; she was sitting up in a
small bed, looking with astonishment at this unexpected vision. Then
suddenly she leaped out of bed and came running toward the girl, and
Leslie caught her in her arms.

“Are you going to take me away? I’m so frightened. These little men
frighten me. I told you about them. One came and left the pistol with
Mother. Oh, take me away, please, please!”

Leslie gathered the frail form in her arms and kissed her.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said, but without any great
conviction. “Tell me quickly, Elizabeth! Is there another way out of
this room?”

To her surprise, the child pointed to a plain wardrobe which stood
against the wall.

“She comes through there sometimes,” she whispered. “A terrible
woman--with an eyeglass. She told me that if I made any trouble, one
of the black men would kill me.” The child shuddered.

Putting her gently away, Leslie went to the wardrobe and pulled open
the door. The wardrobe was empty and reached from the floor to the
height of her head. The back was undoubtedly a door; there was no
disguise about it. There was neither keyhole nor handle. Using all her
strength, she pushed, and the door swung open; it had been fastened by
a very simple spring catch.

She returned to Elizabeth and wrapped a bedspread round her thin
shoulders.

“You’re to be very brave and very quiet,” she whispered. “Come with
me.”

The child hesitated.

“She told me I must never go through there,” she began, but Leslie
reassured her, and they passed through into an apartment which was
also a bedroom though apparently out of use. The bed was not made, and
some of the furniture was shrouded in Holland covers.

Again Leslie opened the main door, this time to find herself on
another landing. There was nobody in sight. Down below, at the foot of
a narrow flight of stairs, a light burned dimly.

“You’ve got a pistol, too,” whispered the child in wonder, and Leslie
smiled.

“Don’t talk,” she whispered into Elizabeth’s ear, and led the way down
the stairs.

They terminated in a small passage, paved with tiles. As she reached
the foot of the stairs she heard the sound of voices, and, looking
round cautiously, she saw that under the stairs was a door, and it was
open. At the far end of the passage was another, and this obviously
led to the outside of the house, for it was chained and bolted.

As she stood, debating what she should do, the voices grew fainter,
and the patch of light on the wall which marked the open door
disappeared. It was her chance. Grasping the child by the arm, she
slipped off her shoes and hurried noiselessly along the passage in her
stockinged feet.

She had reached the door, and with fingers which, in spite of her
will, trembled, moved first one chain and then another. The top and
bottom bolts were drawn; her hand was on the key, when from somewhere
above came an outcry. A bell rang, a door under the stairs was flung
open and three men ran out. The first two did not see her, but made
for the stairs. The third caught sight of her over his shoulder and
yelled a warning. In an instant the three men were flying toward her.
Twice the little pistol banged, and one man slid to the ground with a
yell, grasping his knee. And then they were on her and she was
fighting desperately for life.

She heard the scream of the child and called out to her to open the
door and escape. But Elizabeth was too petrified with terror to make
any movement.

They carried Leslie Maughan, trussed and bound, into the purple salon
and laid her at Anita’s feet. And then the man who spoke English
lifted his hand.

“Lady,” he said, “here is the woman. What shall be done?”

Anita pointed to him with her thick jewelled finger.

“This night you shall have the privilege of torturing her,” she said,
in her grating voice.




 CHAPTER XXII.
 A REAL FATHER

It seemed to Peter Dawlish that he had been unconscious for an
eternity when he turned over on his back with a groan and carefully
felt his damaged head. His face was wet and sticky, and when he
essayed to rise to his feet, it seemed that the whole of the building
was oscillating violently. Presently, however, he was up, keeping to
the wall for support, and, grasping the handle of the door, he jerked
it open and was instantly gripped with hands of steel.

“Hullo, who are you?” asked a stern voice.

“I don’t know--Dawlish--something happened. I saw a light and came
over--and then the door opened and I don’t remember much more.”

The detective recognized him.

“The door opened?” he said anxiously. “Was somebody in the flat?”

Peter nodded and winced.

“Give me a drink,” he said, and the detective guided him by the arm
and led him upstairs to Leslie’s room.

A glass of ice-cold water revived him and he was able to tell a
coherent story of his experience.

“It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes ago,” said the detective.
“I went round to see my opposite number and I’ll swear I wasn’t gone
for more than that time.”

Suddenly he stooped to the floor and took up something. It was a loose
native slipper that had slipped from the foot of Leslie’s captor in
the hurry of departure. The light he had shown when he searched for
this was the light that Peter saw.

“Just wait! I’ll call Mr. Coldwell.”

Inspector Coldwell was at dinner when the message came.

“Hang on, I’ll come down,” he said. “I’ve had a wire from Miss Maughan
that she’s going to Plymouth, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

He was in the flat twenty minutes later. By this time Peter’s wound
had been roughly dressed, and he had washed the stains from his face.
Save for the throb of the wound, he was little the worse for his
experience.

“They coshed you with a rubber club; it is rather a good method,” said
Coldwell callously.

He looked round the room with pursed lips and a frown.

“It doesn’t follow that because those birds were here, she was here,”
he said, and glanced at his watch. “Too early for Miss Maughan to have
arrived at Plymouth. Just wait! I want to make sure.”

He drove to the telegraph office from which the message had been sent,
and was fortunate to find the postmaster just leaving his office.

“I want to see the telegram that was sent from here about five o’clock
to-night addressed to me.”

“You want to see the original telegram, I suppose? That won’t be
difficult.”

It was more difficult than he supposed, and half an hour’s precious
time was wasted before the pencilled form was produced. Coldwell had
only to glance at the writing to know that it was not in Leslie’s
hand. Yet a woman had written it; that was obvious from the
characteristic writing.

He returned to the flat and sent the detective in a cab to Scotland
Yard and Peter employed this interval to tell him of what he had found
in Mrs. Inglethorne’s box.

“I pretty well guess that,” said Inspector Coldwell. “So did
Leslie--Miss Maughan. ‘The son’ meant nothing. This unfortunate lady
had intended to keep the child with her if it was a girl, and that was
not the wish of the gang who were bleeding her. They told her she had
a son. But I’m going to make sure about that before we go any further.
Somehow I’m not so scared about Leslie Maughan as I ought to be
perhaps. She’s got a sort of gun.”

A quarter of an hour later, his cab drew up before the gloomy doors of
Holloway Prison and after a strict scrutiny of his credentials he was
admitted and conducted to one of the main halls of the jail, where the
remand prisoners were housed. The chief wardress opened the door and
went in. Presently she came out and beckoned him into the cell.

Mrs. Inglethorne was sitting, a scowl on her face, her big, raw hands
clasped before her. She knew Coldwell, and lifted her lip in a grin of
rage.

“Don’t you come in here!” she said shrilly. “I’m not going to talk to
you. If you want to find that kid, you go and find her! And that’ll
take you some time, I’ll bet!”

“Listen!” Coldwell had a very direct way with criminals. “Whether
you’ll get a nine-month or more depends on the answer you give me,
Mrs. Inglethorne. There’s just a chance that you may get something
worse.”

She scowled up at him.

“What do you mean?”

Very deliberately he sketched a portion of her life: told her where
she had lived, and how long she had stayed in her various places of
abode. She made no comment or correction, looking down at her hands,
and only when he paused did she meet his eyes.

“Is that all?” she asked insolently.

“Not quite all. You have been engaged in baby farming for the past
twenty years. In 1916, in the month of July, you received from one
called Arthur Druze a baby boy of a few days old. Where is that
child?”

“You’d better find out,” she said.

The detective’s eyes narrowed.

“It is for you to find out,” he said, in that hard, metallic voice
which he adopted on occasions. “You have to prove to me that that
child is alive or there’s another charge against you.”

“Eh?” She was startled. The big mouth trembled. “You can’t charge
me----”

“I’ll charge you with murder, and I’ll dig up the garden of every
house you’ve occupied in the past six years to find evidence.”

Mrs. Inglethorne’s many-chinned jaw dropped; her eyes stared wildly,
and in their depths Coldwell read the very terror of death.

“I’ve done nothing--like that!” She almost screamed.

“You were Martha’s servant, weren’t you?”

She nodded dumbly, and then, throwing herself on the couch, she
writhed like a woman demented. And in her dementia she broke the habit
of a lifetime and told the truth.


A policeman was standing outside the door of Leslie’s flat when
Coldwell came back, and a dozen men stood about on the sidewalk. He
beckoned Peter to him.

“You had better come along,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“To Wimbledon. Do you feel fit enough? There may not be a scrap, but I
rather imagine that her supreme and exalted highness will die
fighting.”

“Is Leslie there?”

Coldwell nodded.

A hundred yards short of May Towers the policemen stopped and the
little army of men got down. On the journey Coldwell had made his
arrangements. Four of the detectives were to make their way to the
back of the house; the remainder were to force the entrance. It was
Coldwell who rang the bell. In his right hand he gripped an ax, ready
to strike at the chain the moment the door was opened.

Standing behind him, Peter saw him stoop his head.

“Can you hear anything?” he whispered.

“No, sir.”

“Thought I heard a scream.”

He waited a few seconds longer, and then:

“Give me the crowbar.”

Somebody passed him up the long steel bar, and with a swing he drove
the clawed ends between door and lintel. Again he struck, and this
time he succeeded. Pulling back with all his strength, the door
cracked open. Two blows from the ax broke the chain, and they streamed
into the dark hall and up the stairs.


The squat Javanese stooped and lifted the girl without an effort, and
as he did so the little men who stood around clapped their hands
rhythmically. Leslie heard and set her teeth, as she felt herself
raised in the strong hands of this hideous little man.

She had a glimpse of Anita Bellini. The hate in her eyes made her
shudder in spite of herself.

“Good-bye, little Maughan!” she mocked. “You are going to your death.”

And then she stopped, her eyes glaring toward the door.

“Stand fast, everybody! Tell these fellows not to move, Bellini!”

It was Coldwell’s voice. Leslie felt herself slipping from the
encircling arms. Then, suddenly, somebody caught her, and she looked
round into the haggard face of Peter Dawlish.

“No gun play,” said Coldwell gently, “and there will be no trouble. I
want you, Bellini! I suppose you are prepared for that?”

“I am called Princess Bellini,” she said.

“Whether you’re Princess Bellini or Annie Druze or Alice Druze is a
matter of supreme indifference to me,” said Coldwell, as he caught her
wrist. “But you have the distinction of being the first woman I’ve
ever handcuffed.” He snapped the cold circle about her wrist. “But
then, you see, most of the ladies I’ve pinched have been gentle little
souls compared to you.”

She made no reply. That old look had come into her face again which
Leslie had seen before.

Then Anita Bellini did an unexpectedly generous thing. She nodded to
the wondering group of natives, shepherded behind three armed
detectives.

“These men have done no harm,” she said. “They have merely carried out
my instructions in ignorance of the law.”

She said something in Javanese to the man who had held Leslie, and he
grinned and answered in the same language.

“My head boy here”--she nodded to him--“will accept responsibility for
the other natives.”

And then, with a sidewise jerk of her head and a hard smile, she said:

“Well, here is the very end of the Druzes.”

“Not quite.” Leslie’s quiet voice interrupted her. “Martha has still
to be disposed of.”

There was anger, but there was fear also in Anita Bellini’s grimace.

“Martha? What do you mean--Martha?” she asked sharply. “I have not
seen her for years.”

Leslie smiled.

“I saw her two days ago, so I have the advantage of you,” she said.

They waited only long enough for Leslie to gather a change of dress
and a coat for the prisoner, and thereafter Anita Bellini went out of
her life forever, except for the day when Leslie stood in the witness
box and testified against the monocled prisoner, who did not look at
her but sat staring straight ahead at the scarlet-robed judge.

Before she collected the clothes, she went in search of Elizabeth, and
found her weeping in her bed in the little dressing room, and
persuaded her to dress. By the time the princess was out of the house
and on her way to Wimbledon police station, the child was arrayed in
her rags. Leslie stood in the doorway looking at her, and she was very
near to tears.

“Elizabeth, do you remember how you used to pretend you had all sorts
of nice fathers?”

The child nodded and smiled.

“Well, I’m going to introduce you to a real one.”

“A real father?” asked the girl breathlessly. “My father?”

“And you’ll never guess who he is.”

Suddenly the child was clinging to her, her arms locked about her
neck. Thus Peter found them, weeping together.




 CHAPTER XXIII.
 AND A MOTHER

It was not often that Mrs. Donald Dawlish made a call at any hour of
the day. The appearance in Berkeley Square of her big car at eleven
o’clock at night was something of an event.

“Mrs. Dawlish?” said Jane in wonder, when the footman came to her with
the news. She had not seen the woman for two years. Indeed, Mrs.
Dawlish’s attitude of late had been frankly antagonistic. “Ask her to
come up, please.”

The woman strode into the room, patting her mop of untidy white hair
into place. She wore the black which suited her better than any more
vivid shade, and on her bosom blazed a diamond star which was just a
little too large to be altogether ornamental.

“I suppose you’re surprised at my coming at this hour?” She dropped
her shawl on the settee, and, walking to the fire, held out her hands
to the blaze.

“I am a little,” said Jane, wondering what was coming next. Nothing
short of a catastrophe could have brought Peter’s mother in such
circumstances.

“I’ve been a good friend of yours, Jane, in the past,” she began, and
her look asked for confirmation; but Jane was silent. “There’s
trouble, bad trouble, over that will of the old man’s,” she went on.
“I’ve had a letter from his lawyer to-night, asking me to give them
all sorts of information that I am not prepared to give. The will was
proved six weeks ago. They can do nothing now, but they nag and nag
and I’m getting tired of it all. They may be acting for Peter, but I
doubt it. But Peter can stop this persecution.”

It was the first news that Jane Raytham had had of any trouble in
connection with the will, but the request was one which she could not
pass unchallenged.

“I know nothing about the matter,” she said. “Peter of course must do
as he wishes. I have no influence there.”

“You have a big influence,” said Mrs. Dawlish emphatically. “Peter has
found out about the child: I suppose you know that?”

Jane nodded.

“The man is crazy to find it, and he----”

She met the gray eyes and stopped.

“I am crazy to find it, too,” said Jane Raytham in a low voice.

“Are you?” Mrs. Dawlish was honestly surprised. “I didn’t think you
were that kind--to worry about--things. Well, that’s all the better
from my point of view. I can give you the child. You can tell Peter
that I’ll give you the child and make him a handsome allowance if he
will stop his lawyers from worrying me.”

“You can give me the child? You know where he is?” Jane’s voice shook.

“Well--yes, I do. It wasn’t a boy, Jane.”

Jane Raytham shrank back as if she had been struck.

“Not a boy? A girl? And you promised me----”

“There’s no sense in talking about promises, or what happened eight
years ago,” said Margaret Dawlish coldly, “I’m talking about the
present. Yes, it was a girl. Druze took her to an old servant of
mine--Martha’s servant!”

Jane could only stare at her, speechless with amazement.

“You--you’re Martha?”

Mrs. Dawlish nodded.

“Martha Druze?”

“Martha Dawlish. I am entitled to that name; not even Peter can take
it from me. I married old Dawlish a fortnight after his wife died in
childbirth. Anita bullied him into it, if you want to know the truth.
She would have married him herself, but Bellini was alive. I was her
favourite sister and she always wanted me to make a good marriage. I
don’t know what she had been to my husband and I don’t very much care,
but she was an attractive woman in those days, before she let herself
go; at any rate she had enough influence to make him marry me.”

Jane passed her hands before her eyes, as though she were trying to
sweep away the mist which still obscured a clear view.

“You’re Martha?” she said again. “Of course, I knew you were a nurse.
Then Peter----”

“No, Peter isn’t my son, if that is what you’re going to say. I
insisted that he shouldn’t be told. I felt it would weaken my position
and authority. Mr. Dawlish was rather an easy-going man and he agreed.
If Peter had had the brains of a gnat he wouldn’t have needed telling.
He had only to see the registration of his birth and compare it with
my marriage certificate to know as much as you know now. Jane, will
you help me with him? I don’t care how large the allowance I make him
is----”

Jane shook her head helplessly.

“I don’t know what I can do. I can’t think very clearly, only--I want
the child--my girl.”

The hard face of Mrs. Dawlish creased in a rare smile.

“Is there nobody else who wants her?” she asked significantly. “Has
Peter no rights? You haven’t thought of that, I suppose?”

“I have thought of it,” said Jane in a low voice. “But I know Peter.
And whether I or he have her, she will be free to us both. We’re going
very swiftly down the slope, and the slope is getting steeper and
Heaven knows where we shall land at the bottom. I’ve been just as
wicked as a woman can be. I’m a bigamist--don’t interrupt me,
please--I’m a bigamist and my husband must know. I don’t think it will
worry him as much as it worries me, and in a way he’ll be rather glad
to get rid of me. But I can face all that if I have my baby! I’ll do
what I can,” she went on quickly, recovering the lost balance, “if it
doesn’t hurt Peter. I’ve hurt him enough. He is too good a man to be
wounded any further. I cannot see him to-night; I will write to him
and ask if I may see him to-morrow, and then----”

The door was opening slowly and a man came in whose head was bandaged.
At first she did not recognize him, and then:

“Why--why, Peter!” she faltered.

He was leading by the hand a little girl in a worn, stained ulster.
The golden head was hatless. Jane Raytham looked down into that
beautiful child face, saw the clear eyes looking at her wonderingly,
solemnly, and put up her hand to her throat, hardly daring to speak.
She opened her lips; no sound came. She made yet another effort.

“Who is this, Peter?”

It was not like her own voice.

“This is Elizabeth,” said Peter gently. “Elizabeth”--he stooped and
looked into the child’s face--“Elizabeth, this is your mother!”




 CHAPTER XXIV.
 THESE WOMEN

“I’m sorry to have brought you down to this very unpretentious
little flat of mine,” said Leslie, “but I have discovered in myself
some of the qualities of a showman, and really and truly, most of the
documents and proofs I have are here.”

And then she laughed, rocking from side to side in her chair.

“What is the joke?” asked Coldwell suspiciously.

“You look so like Christy minstrels, all sitting round in a circle
with your hands on your knees, and it’s three o’clock in the morning,
and--there are a dozen reasons why I should laugh. I’ll begin at the
beginning; shall I?

“I suppose everybody knows how I worked up an interest in this case,
through finding a book of poems in a little Cumberland farmhouse, and
how I put two and several together, made them four, guessed them six,
and finally proved their real quantity beyond doubt.

“There was a family living in Devonshire named Druze.”

Briefly she retailed all that the clergyman had told her, and all she
had learned from subsequent inquiries.

“Annie Druze was in reality Anita. Alice was Arthur Druze, and Martha,
the younger of the two, eventually became Mrs. Dawlish. The three
girls were very staunch friends. They had made some sort of compact in
their childhood to stand together through thick and thin and that is
the only creditable aspect of their subsequent careers. Annie went
abroad as a lady’s maid, and scraped an acquaintance in some way with
an impecunious scion of an Italian family and married him. Martha had
a training in a hospital, became a maternity nurse, and was
subsequently called in to nurse Peter’s mother with her first child.

“Alice, the middle sister, joined her sister in Java, where the prince
had taken some minor position. I have had a long talk with Martha, and
she tells me that Alice Druze became Arthur Druze as the result of a
masquerade. She went one night to a fancy-dress ball dressed as a man,
and nobody guessed her identity. The possibility may have occurred to
Anita, as she had become, that in this guise her sister would be of
use to her, for there is little question that even so long ago Anita
was engaged in blackmail.

“There is proof that she blackmailed a government official of Java,
and there is the record of a complaint made to the English police in
’89 when she returned to this country, from the wife of one of her
victims. And she did not stop at blackmail. Martha--who, to save her
own skin, has betrayed everybody--says that she had forged three bills
of exchange to her knowledge. It is established that it was Anita who
forged Lord Everreed’s signature, and, taking advantage of Peter being
out of the way, got Druze to cash the check, the proceeds of which
were divided between the two sisters. Whether she did this out of
sheer wickedness and with Martha’s knowledge in order to ruin Peter,
or whether she was in low water, I cannot discover. Martha suggests
the latter reason and swears that she knew nothing about the forgery
until later. I have my own opinion.

“Anita was distantly acquainted with Jane before Peter knew her, but
she did not become interested in her until after her marriage and
return to England. The arrest of Peter coincided with Anita’s learning
that Lord Raytham, a very rich man, was anxious to marry Jane, who in
some mysterious fashion had disappeared. Anita guessed the cause and
went in search of and found her. She learned of Jane’s condition and
kept by her, her object being to persuade her to marry Raytham, so
that she might profitably exploit the new Lady Raytham. She tried to
persuade Jane that her marriage wasn’t legal, hoping that the girl in
her desperation would commit bigamy and be under her thumb for the
rest of her life. But Jane made one desperate attempt to free herself
from the marriage. She went to Reno, applied for a divorce, and that
divorce was granted.”

“Granted?” Jane’s voice was shrill, almost a scream. “It was not
granted, Leslie; it was refused!”

“It was granted. Your decree was made absolute. I have a cablegram
from the clerk of the court to that effect; it arrived last night.
Naturally, Anita did her best to prevent the divorce, because, if it
were given, she had practically no hold except the child, which was
subsequently taken away by her sister and handed to Mrs. Inglethorne,
who for four years was in Martha’s employment. When she found she
couldn’t stop the divorce, she induced Jane to go out of court while
the judge was giving his decision. Her car was waiting at the door of
the court, and Jane was sitting in it, waiting for the verdict. It was
not until Anita came out of court and joined her in the car that Jane
learned that the divorce had been refused. She married Raytham,
believing that she was a bigamist, and yet finding poor sort of
comfort in the belief that there had been some sort of irregularity in
her marriage which made it invalid.

“For seven years Jane Raytham has been paying toll to the blackmailer,
supposedly the man who had charge of the child, in reality to Anita
Bellini and her sister.

“Immediately after her return from America, Jane went to Appledore,
her time being very near at hand. It was then that Martha was called
in, and the poor girl learned that her white-aproned nurse was the
terrible Mrs. Dawlish whom Peter hated and feared. This was the
beginning of Jane’s time of torment which endured until a week ago.
Then Druze, as I will call her, got scared. I think I was the person
responsible. My inquiries about the twenty thousand pounds that had
been drawn from Jane’s bank, information which came to Scotland Yard
in quite a normal way, frightened her and she decided to go abroad,
getting as much money as she possibly could before she left.

“Jane gave her her emerald chain, and with this Druze went off to
interview her sister. There was some little quarrel as to the division
of the spoils. Anita, who was the stronger of the two, snatched the
chain from her sister’s hands, never expecting that the woman,
infuriated with drink and anger, carried a pistol. In the struggle
which followed, Druze was shot, but in some miraculous fashion still
retained her hold of the square emerald. I can only imagine that Anita
was so beside herself with grief that she did not make a search. In a
panic she had the body put in the car and taken to the lonely spot and
left there. But new clues were coming to light every day. Mrs.
Inglethorne reported the presence of Peter Dawlish in her house and
his interest in the child. Imagining that he suspected who Elizabeth
was, and that his coming to Severall Street was designed, she had the
little girl taken to Wimbledon, and concentrated all her mind upon
getting rid of my unworthy self. For in me she thought she saw her
chief enemy, and I think she was right.

“And that,” said Leslie simply, “is that!”

Mr. Coldwell got up stiffly and stretched himself.

“I’m going home to bed. It’s very unlikely that you will be troubled
by the little yellow boys, and I think I can leave you and your
Lucretia here without any misgivings. I don’t know how this is going
to look in court, or who will be brought into the case and who will
not, but those things are the little unpleasantnesses which you will
have to live through and live down.”

Jane knew he was addressing her and smiled.

“I can live everything down,” she said, “and live through everything,
if somebody will let that little yellow head sleep on my pillow now
and again.”

She walked across to Peter and held out her hand.

“I don’t know whether I’m glad about the divorce,” she said. “I think
I am. And I hope you are, Peter.”

She cast a swift sidelong glance toward Leslie, who was arranging her
papers at the desk, and dropped her voice still lower.

“Do you think somebody else is glad?” she asked.

“I hope so,” said Peter, and for the first and last time Jane Raytham
felt a little twinge that had a remote resemblance to jealousy.

It was gone in a second.

“Come and see me to-morrow; I want to arrange things for--our family.”

And when his lips twitched, she said:

“That smile was almost paternal.”

They were all gone at last except Peter and Leslie, and Lucretia,
washing up noisily in the scullery, her door half open to insure the
proprieties.

“Well?” asked Leslie.

“Very well--bewilderingly well.”

“I told you about Mrs. Dawlish and what she intends to do?”

He nodded.

“You can, of course, charge her with being privy to the forgery, but I
think it was Anita’s work. It will be so much better if you allow her
to pass the property to you by deed of gift. That makes you a very
rich man, Peter. What are you going to do with it? Buy a house in Park
Lane?”

“Would you like a house in Park Lane?” he asked.

“I’d like almost any kind of house, Peter,” she said quietly.

Lucretia, looking through the half-opened door, saw the brown head of
her mistress pillowed on Peter’s shabby jacket, saw him bend his head
and kiss her.

Lucretia sneered.

“My stars!” she said, addressing nobody in particular. “These women!”

 THE END




 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. drawing-room/drawing room,
motor-car/motor car, etc.) have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

Abandon the use of drop-caps.

Punctuation: fix some quotation mark pairings/nestings, and some
missing/invisible periods.

[Chapter XXI]

Change “The back was _undoubted y_ a door” to _undoubtedly_.

[Chapter XXIV]

“When she found she _couldn t_ stop… court _wh le_ the judge” to
_couldn’t_ and _while_, respectively.

 [End of text]








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