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.