XII

Peter Dawlish 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; and inevitably they wandered towards that grey 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 westwards 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, towards the golden-bearded warder who stood by the iron gates and counted the prisoners in and out; to the long, smelly “ward,” and the vault-like cells with their gaily 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. Much better than letting your fancies go straying towards 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 amidst 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 motorcar brakes as it 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 leapt 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 half-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 nodded; “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, God 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 towards 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 had 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.

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 towards Leslie Maughan. Then through the open window he heard unsteady steps coming along the paved sidewalk. It paused before the door of the house; there was a rattle of the key. Mrs. Inglethorne often went out at night, and as often returned with that same unsteady footstep. Presently the door slammed, and her muttering came up to him from the passage.

It was the first time he had seen or heard her that day. Usually, she did not go out at 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 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.

“Whatcher goin’ to do?” asked Mrs. Inglethorne unsteadily.

“She will sleep in my room for the night,” replied Peter. “Tomorrow 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.”

Which 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 bedrail and put it on top. “Sleep well,” he smiled, 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 learnt in Dartmoor, of fences who visited the scene of prospective robberies and priced the lot, practically paying for it, before it was stolen; of skilful 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 instil in me a passion for agriculture, and Canadian agriculture at that. I love Canada: you can’t even take a weekend 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 flyleaf. It was when I saw that the first letter of every line reading from below upwards made the words ‘Jane Dawlish’ 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 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 towards 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 are 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 done. 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.”

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-lorry 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 motorcar 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—

“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 into 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 XY 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 tonight; 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. Both 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. 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 learnt 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 semicircle 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 bled 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, 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 ‘nose’!1 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 roared for 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-lorry 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 what 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 forego 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 vicarage near Budleigh Salterton, and he had, as he said in a preliminary flourish, “reached the four score 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 40 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 gaiety, 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 Godfearing 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 afterwards, 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 tonight,” 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 draught that swept up the stairs, that Lucretia had followed her usual practice of leaving the door ajar whilst 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 unease 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 whilst 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 standard. 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 on to the sidewalk immediately beneath the window. Standing on the rail of the bus, one of the policemen reached the windowsill 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. Tomorrow 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 friezes of the wardrobe, was relieved.

He heard the policeman 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 came 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, testing its strength, and was satisfied. He felt the long, queer-shaped knife that was in his belt, running his thumb along the edge, before he gripped it between his teeth and, with the agility of a cat, and supported only by his sinewy fingers, 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 in 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 towards 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 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 smoke stack. Ever wear garters, Leslie?”

She laughed softly.

“That sounds almost 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 today.”

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.