“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?”