Bill looked round him in hunted fashion. Then, obeying his lifelong instinct that in dealing with his mother, discretion was the better part of valor, he picked up his cap and backed to the door. He mumbled something about--"Step out an' 'ave a look round"--and was gone. His mother glared furiously at the door. If only she had thought to lock it when the policemen went! But she wasted no time in useless regrets. When Bill came back to supper she'd get it all out of him. Meanwhile it might be as well to go out and explain to one or two neighbors how her two cousins in the police force had been to see her. She put on her bonnet and went. Bill, skulking at the corner of the street, waited till she was out of sight. Then, slipping into the house, he collected his kit and his rifle, and went to a Y.M.C.A. at Victoria, and there he spent the night. Mrs. Grant did not see her son again before he departed for the front; she was thus free to invent her own reasons for his visit from the police. But she never connected Bill with the statement which appeared subsequently in the less dignified newspapers. "The Denmore Manor Mystery still continues to baffle the most acute intellects of the police force. It is, however, certain, from evidence of the most unimpeachable nature, that the whole affair is a plot of German intrigue and the Hidden Hand. When will the Government ...? Etc., etc." Bill, on the steamer crossing from England to France, read this passage aloud to Alf, to whom he had already recounted the story of "Conky." "You _are_ a one, Bill," said Higgins, quite in his ancient vein of fervent admiration. Bill merely looked self-conscious. He felt that the tribute was no more than his due. CHAPTER XVII THE FATE OF THE BUTTON Neither of the two friends could have said with truth that he was sorry to see France once more. Alf had a feeling that now, at any rate, his disastrous venture into high life and the public eye was really behind him. He could slip back thankfully into his old routine as an unconsidered cog in an enormous machine, and be lost in the friendly obscurity. The Button still hung from its string round his neck. He determined that it should continue to hang there; he was afraid to dispose of it, in case it should fall into the hands of some other man and be used for unimaginable evil. He had an almost fanatical determination that he himself should never again test the Button's supernatural powers; but in addition, he felt that he had a sacred charge to prevent anybody else from doing so. When he had left the Base and was already in the leave train and bound for the line, he realized that his best course would have been to drop the Button into the sea on his way across. But the idea came to him--as ideas generally came to Alf--too late.